THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



The 
People of Mexico 

PFho They Are and How They Live 



BY 



WALLACE THOMPSON 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 









FEB -2 1321 



The People of Mexico 



Copyright, 1021, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

A-V 



Q)GLA608197 



7^ 



To 

My Father 
ALTON HOWARD THOMPSON 

Who in the folklore that he gave me in 

my childhood taught me that science 

could be as joyous as romance. 



CONTENTS 

Part I 
WHO THEY ARE 

HAP. PAGE 

Preface xi 

I. The Mexican Type 3 

Physical and mental characteristics — Clash of cul- 
tures — Racial phases of Mexican history — Mexico 
now a mixed-breed land — The menace of the tide of 
Indianism. 

II. Race Origins 14 

Absence of any race strain save Indian and Spanish 
— Indian contribution largely of vital force — Anti- 
white manifestations — Racial history of Aztecs — 
Indian type virtually unchanged — Spanish contribu- 
tion cultural — Failure of racial amalgamation as a 
solution. 

III. The Melting Pot 35 

Racial correspondences in Mexican history — Rank 
of three race types — Mestizo race or mongrel? — Re- 
version to primitive types — Political domination of 
mestizos — Disintegration of mestizo control. 

IV. Mexico's Population . 56 

Faults of early censuses — Populations throughout 
historj^ — Rate of increase — Emigration and Immigra- 
tion — Distribution and density — Rural and urban. 



\ 



CONTENTS 

lAP. PAGE 

V. Vitality 86 

Birth and death rates — Infant mortality — Death 
rates by age groups — Causes of deaths — Health — 
Climate — Vices — Defectives 

VI. Castes and Classes 110 

Racial origins of castes — Creation of upper and 
middle classes — Description of present Mexican 
classes — Rank of foreigners. 



Part II 
HOW THEY LIVE 

I. Climate 131 

Poverty of Mexico in agriculture — Climate of three 
sorts — Strain of climate on population — Rainfall 
inadequate — Irrigation — Low corn production — Men- 
ace of famine. 

II. The Mexican Community and Its Government . 152 
Feudalism and Indian Communism — Ideas of 
property — Ranches and haciendas — Indian villages 
and Spanish cities — Government and public order — 
Organization of rule — Functions of states and towns — 
Communications — Police. 

III. Religion 170 

Christian domination — Statistics of Catholics and 
Protestants — Types of native Catholics — Spanish 
missions — Church in politics — Civil vs. religious 
marriage — Protestanism . 

IV. Education 195 

Illiteracj' — School statistics — Educational budgets 
— Controversies over educational systems — Moral 
Education — Education for life. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

V. The Family 210 

Patriarchal organization — Domestic relations — Di- 
vorce — Marriage statistics — Size of families — Position 
of women — Children. 

VI. Mexican Houses 235 

Town plan — Types of houses — Materials — Rooms 
and furnishings — Statistics of housing — Overcrowding 
— Modern housing. 

VII. Mexico's Foods 257 

Unity of national diet — Corn and beans — National 
dishes — Meat and vegetables — Drinks — Food dis- 
tribution — Nutritive value of Mexican diet — Under- 
nourishment. 

VIII. Clothing 286 

National costumes — Dress of Aztecs — The Mexican 
hat — Zerape and reboso — Cosmetics and adornment. 

IX. Cleanliness and Sanitation 301 

Mexican laundries — Peon attitude toward cleanli- 
ness — Baths — Vermin — Sanitation and water supply 
— American sanitation in Vera Cruz — Cemeteries — 
Care of the sick. 

X. The Conditions of Labor 315 

Relation of Indians to land — Spanish land laws — 
Peonage, origins and history — Labor efficiency — 
Hours of labor — Classification of labor — Labor of 
children — Labor of women — Labor organizations — 
Labor legislation. 

XL Income and the Cost of Living 348 

National improvidence — Lack of close relationship 
between income and social conditions^Sources of 
income — History of wages — Credit system — Personal 



CONTENTS 

CH.A.P. PAGE 

budget — Food costs — Shelter and clothing — Pawn- 
shops and usury. 

XII. Vices, Crime, and Pauperism 371 

Gambling, drinking, and sexual overindulgence the 
national vices — Prohibition — Political crime — Crime 
against property — Classification of crimes against 
persons — Statistics — Pauperism and beggary — 
Institutions. 

XIII. Conclusion 399 

Index 411 



PREFACE 

THIS book offers itself as an Anatomy of Mexico. 
It deals with one of the grievously sick nations 
of the world, in the diagnosis of whose ills our 
greatest lack has not been — Heaven save the mark! 
— for minute descriptions of her pains and aches, 
nor yet for elaborate explanations of her afflictions 
and suggested panaceas. Our deficiency has been 
rather in understanding of the patient, how she is 
made and how she has been hving and thinking, and 
in honest appraisal of her antecedents. 

The information vital to such understanding has 
been almost inaccessible. Much was scattered 
through many books, from government statistics 
to records of travel, but even there surprisingly 
little of it has existed in easily assimilated form. 
Writing and talking of Mexico as I have done for 
nearly twenty years, I have come to feel that there 
is no greater single need of those who would under- 
stand the Mexican situation of yesterday and to- 
day, and to-morrow as well, than a work that strives 
seriously to set down and interpret the fundamentals 
of the national anatomy. It is that need which 
this book seeks to fill. 

Its materials are from many sources; their ar- 



PREFACE 

rangement, digestion, and interpretation are almost 
entirely mine. Of the two parts, the first, save for 
its statistical tables, is largely original, the second 
a compilation and interpretation of available data. 
The first part, in its frank discussion of the race 
question, will perhaps be challenged, but there I 
have said nothing that Mexicans themselves do not 
whisper. Nor have I approached this very vital 
subject with anything but the friendliest apprecia- 
tion of those always simpatico and understanding 
gentlemen, the Mexican mestizos, who have, many 
of them, sought so sincerely to solve their country's 
problems. The historical data in this part I have 
taken largely from Bancroft, always authoritative 
and always sound, much of the material on race 
from Bandelier; the more recent studies I have con- 
sidered as supplementary, for many of them are 
still controversial, and, moreover, this question of 
race and its manifestations is one of the fields to 
which future research has yet to contribute much. 
The statistical material in the first section, as in the 
second, is necessarily from Mexican sources, whose 
reliability is always questionable, although, where 
comparisons were not anticipated by the Mexican 
editors of the official reports (as in my vitality 
tables) much significant matter has been discover- 
able. The rearrangement of the data, which had 
always to be made, puts a large amount of statistics 
for the first time in usable form. 

The second part of the book, dealing with living 
conditions, has made use of source material which 
could be reached. To this end the invaluable files 



PREFACE 

of the Doheny Research Foundation, covering 
practically everything printed on Mexico that is 
available in the United States, were used freely; 
to them were added statistical and other data 
gathered personally, my own notes being the basis 
for most of the facts and observations in such chap- 
ters as Foods, Housing, Labor, etc. 

The list of those to whom I owe gratitude for 
tangible aid must of necessity, in a work of this 
sort, be very long, and includes a host of personal 
friends whose contribution could not be appraised. 
Of those who have actually helped toward the mak- 
ing of the manuscript, I would name Miss Ida A, 
Tourtellot, my associate in the original work of the 
Doheny Research Foundation, a valued colleague 
and a sympathetic critic, and with her the many 
other members of the Foundation who were truly 
my confreres. Prof. Ellsworth Huntington, to whom 
I owe much of the material on climate, Mr. Madi- 
son Grant for important suggestions on the gen- 
eral subject of race. Dr. Norman Bridge, for his 
invaluable criticism and inspiration, and Mr. 
Edward L. Doheny, for his faith in the sincerity 
of my study and his genuine devotion to the best 
interests of Mexico. 

Wallace Thompson. 

New York, November 1, 1920. 



PART I 
WHO THEY ARE 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

WHAT is a Mexican? What is his racial, his 
cultural background? Whence did he come? 
What did he bring with him from beyond the glow 
of his recorded history? What type has he truly 
been through the strenuous periods since he emerged 
from the melting pot of the three-hundred-year- 
long Spanish regime? What is he to-day and what 
is he to be? 

These are questions which even the most factual 
students of Mexican history are coming to ask 
themselves. They are questions of the impersonal 
observer of international affairs, and of the patriotic 
American or European who grasps dimly that this 
anomalous people is having a disproportionate in- 
fluence upon the social and industrial trends of the 
world. They are questions which Mexicans them- 
selves ask, with a growing frankness into which the 
dangerous words ''race" and "atavism" and 
"white civilization" enter significantly. They are 
questions that cannot be answered categorically, 

for the Ught of the past is filtered through glasses 

3 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of prejudice and caution, coloring the most ob- 
vious facts and distorting the most impersonal 
standards. 

The 15,000,000 Mexicans include 6,000,000 pure- 
blooded Indians of fifty tribal strains, and until the 
exile of the upper classes under Carranza approx- 
imately 1,000,000 pure whites of Spanish hneage 
also called themselves Mexicans; between the two 
extremes are 8,000,000 mestizos (literally mixed 
bloods) to whose creation the two primary races 
have for four centuries contributed contrasting 
elements. It is the resultant hybrid whose numbers 
make him the typical Mexican of to-day. 

The body of the Indian, small, firm, and sturdy, 
has been softened by the narrow-hipped litheness 
of the Spaniard to a combination, in this mestizo 
Mexican, surprisingly lacking in Indian endurance 
and Spanish virility. The glistening copper skin 
of the Indian has been paled by the Spaniard's 
olive glow to varying shades of chocolate brown. 
The long skull and oval face of the white have, 
however, affected the rounded contour of the Indian 
type but little, so that the mestizo is a ''round- 
head," his cheek bones are high, though less prom- 
inent than in the aborigines, while his nostrils are 
wide and lips rather thick. The eyes, uniformly 
dark, tend to the Indian form, with a greater curve 
in the lower lid than is normal in the European, and 
the upper lid much straighter. The hair is black 
and straight, and coarse and bristly almost in di- 
rect proportion to the preponderance of Indian 

blood. There is relatively little body hair, and the 

4 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

beard is thin and sparse, also an almost infallible 
index of the proportion of Indian strain. 

Intellectually and psychologically, the Mexican 
mestizo is more of a hybrid than he is physically. 
His body type has varied characteristics, although 
perhaps tending disproportionately to the Indian, 
but in his brain there seethes the continual conflict 
of intellectual and psychological predispositions 
which go back to cultures which in the history of 
humanity are thousands of years apart. In his 
mind the blind, unchanging grasp of tradition and 
superstition which mark the Indian combine with 
the brilhant logic of the Spaniard to create a person, 
unstable and at the same time inexorable, bound 
by racial prejudices which he does not understand 
and yet which he justifies with an Occidental logic 
that confuses both himself and the observer. 
Brave and often devoted, cruel and blindly selfish, 
proud and childishly sensitive; admiring material 
and spiritual achievement extravagantly, yet al- 
most incapable alone of the concentration and 
sacrifice which create these achievements; senti- 
mental and poetical, yet almost untouched by great 
passions and desires; the Mexican is the victim of 
his mixed racial and cultural heritage, the plaything 
of primal forces which tend ever to neutralize one 
another into a personality of ten unworthy alike of his 
rich Spanish intensity and of his Indian simplicity. 
Though he conceives his revolutions, his social re- 
forms, and his material progress in high-sounding 
terms of altruism, the forces with which he has torn 
his country to tatters and even those with which, 

5 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

from time to time, he has bound up her wounds, have 
been selfish ambitions and narrow personal desires 
which partook neither of the white man's militant 
altruism nor of the red man's love of glory. 

Whoever reads Mexican history with an under- 
standing mind must realize that since Cortez came 
in 1521 to this day Mexico has known but two 
periods of progress, material or spiritual — one the 
long, slow evolution under Spanish tutelage, and 
one that golden age when the mestizo dictator, 
Diaz, emerging from sixty years of personality- 
ridden revolutions, called back from exile to the 
task of service the white aristocrats who alone 
remained as Mexicans from that picturesque horde 
of priests and teachers, soldiers and traders, who 
brought the paternal civilization of the white man 
to the building of New Spain. The mestizo may 
indeed have evolved the idea of a nation, but the 
Diaz regime, as its finest flowering, harnessed the 
forces that yet remained of white understanding 
and sacrifice to the making of that nation. What 
we have seen for the past ten years may be called 
the disintegration of the mestizo idea of nation- 
alism into its component parts. What the Mexi- 
cans call ''personalism" in politics is but the 
remnant in the mixed stock of the self-assured 
superiority of the white, and the antiforeign laws 
and the bloody outrages upon the whites are but 
the Indian fear and hatred of white domination. 

One of the basic facts which must be recognized 
and accepted before one can go on to a true under- 
Standing of the people of Mexico is that what ig 

e 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

going on in Mexico to-day and what has been going 
on there through all of her revolutions since 1810 
is basically the uprising of the dark races against 
the white, a movement too mighty in its scope and 
too patent a peril to be glossed over by anyone 
who would speak truthfully of conditions in Mexico 
to-day. Indeed, one of the ablest of Mexican pub- 
Ucists has himself written that ''at the bottom of 
all the troubles of Mexico ... is the prehistoric 
Indian civilization trying to destroy the European 
civilization; which to-day it has very nearly accom- 
plished." 1 

The Spaniards brought to Mexico ideals and am- 
bitions far different from those which the English 
colonists carried to New England. Centuries of 
warfare with Moslems and Jews had fired the 
Spaniards to religious zeal, and they imposed upon 
the Mexicans the double yoke of religion and labor, 
while the English Puritans and Cavaliers were 
exterminating their Indians and making little 
effort to convert them. The Indian stocks which 
the English and the Spaniards met were themselves 
very different, and to the Spaniards fell a people 
long ruled by despotic chieftains, long held in 
religious bondage to cruel gods, more ready to 
change masters than to oppose a racial enemy. 
The conversion of the Indians to the Christian 
faith, the reaching out of the Spanish arms and 
the Cross to distant missions which became centers 
of a sort of European civilization and the final 

^ T. Esquivel Obregon, in Hispanic American Historical Review, 
May, 1919, p. 170. 

7 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

welding of a strangely conglomerate population 
into a colony which finally became the Mexican 
nation, is one of the great romances of history. 
Far flung over an area many times that conquered 
by the English whites in America before their 
revolution, the Spanish crown, combining both 
Church and state, destroyed tribal and theocratic 
governments, uprooted and virtually wiped out the 
native culture and civilization, and forced upon the 
Indian population the standards, the culture, the 
religion, and the language of Castile. 

Three objects inspired the Spanish conquerors, 
both priests and soldiers: physical domination, 
racial amalgamation, and intellectual control. The 
white man's arrogance and science quickly achieved 
the physical domination of the natives. The 
racial amalgamation rapidly created what was, 
after the Mexican revolution of 1823, to come to 
consider itself a new race — the mestizo — a blending 
of the peoples, which, in the effort on the part of 
the mixed blood to set himself up as the inheritor of 
the white man's superiority, keeps the racial results 
of the Spanish conquest forever upon the surface of 
Mexican affairs. 

In intellectual control the Spaniards achieved an 
apparently far-reaching success from the very 
beginning. Fanatical missionaries destroyed the 
cultural as well as the religious foundations of 
Indian civilization, and during the Spanish regime 
there was but one government and one Church. 
For those three centuries the Spanish government 
and the Church sought to wean the Indians rapidly 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

away from their savagery into the glaring light of 
the European civilization of their time. 

The Indian was a ward of Chm-ch and state, and, 
as much for his care as by the power of wealth, 
there was raised up an aristocracy of white men 
and of white women devoted, as far as their under- 
standing went, to the welfare of their people, 
masters who helped to bring out of the indigenous 
stock such strength and virtues as their European 
eyes could find. 

During those three hundred years practically all 
of the civilized Mexico which we know to this day 
was built. At the expulsion of the Spaniards in 
1823 almost the last of the churches had been 
finished, almost the last of the essential Mexican 
codes of justice had been hammered out, almost the 
last plan of Indian education had been conceived 
and had been partially executed. 

Out of this full day of progress Mexico passed 
into independence and into a night of bloody wars 
in which the Indians, snatched from the security 
and lethargy of serfdom, were gathered into armies 
and thrown against one another in battle lines. 
Independence but found them new misfortunes; it 
wrecked their homes and devastated their fields, 
and for fifty years white against mestizo and mestizo 
against white wielded Indian armies like clubs in 
fratricidal war. Most of the accumulated energy 
and wealth inherited from Spanish times was 
destroyed, and out of her final exhaustion, guided 
by Porfirio Diaz, an inspired rebel who became a 
successful revolutionist and ultimately a great 

9 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

statesman, Mexico emerged into her years of 
peace. 

Previous to Diaz the mestizo revolutionists had 
demonstrated throughout their succeeding up- 
heavals that the freedom which they demanded 
and which they promised to the Indians was in 
essence a freedom to loot and despoil their country, 
a freedom to use society for their own ends, features 
typical of the revolutions of 1810 to 1876, just as 
they are typical of the revolutions since 1910. 
Diaz from the beginning displayed a new tolerance 
and wisdom which quickly reconciled all social 
forces to his government. He brought back the 
old Creole ^ aristocracy because he recognized Mex- 
ico's vital need of the stabilizing influence of the 
social power which thej^ represented. From these 
white aristocrats, representing ordered society, as 
the white aristocrats of Mexico who are now in 
exile represent all that remains in the world to-day 
of Mexican social power, Diaz forged the tools of 
his great regime. These were the tools of the 
white man's code, the tools which built Mexico's 
greatness as a colony of Spain, tools whose intelli- 
gence and devotion made her greatness under Diaz. 

The Mexican problem has, in the words of her 
own statesmen, time and again been announced as 
a social question and a social question alone. Diaz 
has been criticized and anathematized because to 
the solution he brought only political peace and 
economic progress, leaving, as his detractors say, 

^The word "creole" is used in Mexico to-day to designate any 
Mexican of pure white ancestry. 

10 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

the great social problem utterly untouched — 
socially. Yet as one looks on the Mexican situa- 
tion to-day, realizing that on these myriad social 
problems Mexican mestizos have brought to bear 
political solutions borrowed from our Anglo-Saxon 
constitutions, borrowed from Teutonic Marxian 
socialism, borrowed even from Russian Bolshevism, 
one finds oneself swinging back to a simple appre- 
ciation of the material bases of human progress, 
the material bases that gave the Indian in Mexico 
under the viceroys and under Diaz a place to call 
home, a tiny corn patch where he could raise his 
food unmolested and a Church wherein, for all its 
faults, his soul found surcease. 

This was the white man's rule and this is the 
rule which gave way in Mexico after the viceroys 
to anarchy and misery and which gave way after 
the dictatorship to anarchy and misery. Here is 
the essence of the problem in that at least for such 
a land as Mexico, where a vast mass of population 
lives forever on the outer verge of poverty, the 
beginnings of progress and the beginnings of civili- 
zation must be concerned first with the filling of 
the human stomach and the satisfaction of the 
human craving for home and religion and happiness. 
These things the mestizo revolutions of Mexico 
have never given to anyone save their demagogues. 

Yet to-day Mexico is a mestizo, a half-breed, 
land. The characteristics of Indian and of Span- 
iard are merged in her population and in her rulers. 
But as we watch her progress downward through 

revolution after revolution, and as we shall observe 

11 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

her life in the pages which make up this book, we 
find forced upon us the reahzation that in this 
welter of conflicting cultures and psychologies the 
predominating factor to-day is Indian, and that 
sooner or later, unless the white world again takes 
up the burden, Mexico must inevitably slip back 
to the plane of pre-Spanish barbarism. 

Mexico stands to-day at our doorstep dressed 
in the rags of our civilization. In our pride we 
believed that those rags would clothe her always, 
and we have lent our prestige to our half brothers, 
the mestizos, in the belief that they would see that 
the clothing of our civilization on the Indian would 
be kept in repair. We must recognize and admit 
that to-day the half brother is a failure. He has 
used the whip which we gave him for discipline 
with the hand of a slave driver; he has stained the 
sword of authority with the blood of his wards; he 
has thrown back in our faces the mangled bodies 
of our martyred missionaries of religion, of com- 
merce, and of science. A hundred years ago his 
Indian blood raised him against white rule, and to- 
day his Indian blood has almost conquered his white 
virtues. He is about to pass under the sway, first 
mentally and morally, and ultimately physically and 
culturally, of the Indian. The path behind him is 
clear and broad ; we can look back on it, lined with 
ruins and with crosses. Ahead through the jungle 
a new road is to be carved. It may go in many 
ways, and the choice comes forcibly to us, more 
forcibly every day, with the realization that we, 

the white, we alone must choose. The mestizo, 

12 



THE MEXICAN TYPE 

the true Mexican, is helpless, torn and driven by his 
conflicting heritages, and yet always and hopelessly 
with the white in him overawed and made despicable 
by the Indian strain which pushes up and up and 
up even as his skin darkens under the tropic sun. 



II 

RACE ORIGINS 

FOR four hundred years Mexico has lived in 
racial isolation. During the three colonial cen- 
turies no white men excepting Spaniards were al- 
lowed to enter, and through the hundred years of 
independence (save only for the last decade of the 
Diaz rule) no other foreigners have attempted per- 
manent residence in the country. When the first 1 
revolution broke out in 1810 there were 60,000 I 
foreign born; in 1825, after the expulsion of the ' 
Spaniards, there .were probably not over 1,000; 
in 1895 there were 3,713; in 1900, 57,508; in 1910, 
115,869; and in 1920 there are not over 5,000 
foreigners in all Mexico. ^ 

This racial isolation is probably the most im- 
portant single fact in Mexican history. It gave 
her the long preponderance of Spanish culture; 
from it has come the turbulent domination of the 
mestizos, and that disintegration of the half-breed 
stock toward Indianism which characterizes Mexico 
to-day. Toward it we must look for the aristocracy 
of indigenous white men who alone seem capable of 
saving Mexico from herself. 

From the beginning of Spanish rule in 1521, all 

14 



RACE ORIGINS 

foreigners were excluded from the American col- 
onies, primarily to insure political and religious 
control, and secondarily to prevent a knowledge 
of their wealth from reaching the ears of the hardy 
French and English buccaneers. None but Span- 
ish ships sailed to Vera Cruz, and heavy penalties 
were exacted of the sea captains who carried 
foreigners without license from the king. In all 
colonial history not over half a dozen Englishmen 
(old residents of Spain) visited Mexico as merchants, 
and Baron von Humboldt, who traveled five years 
in Spanish America under royal patronage, met but 
one German resident and found that the natives 
could not beheve that there were white men who 
did not speak Spanish. 

The age of Diaz was a period of slow opening to 
the outside world, but marked, as we have seen, by 
hardly more than ten years of appreciable foreign 
inmiigration. Even then the foreign population had 
little interest in any form of racial amalgamation, 
while the economic situation, both before Diaz and 
since, has created an impregnable barrier against the 
"energizing stream of white immigration from be- 
yond the seas" which has been advocated from time 
to time by foreigners and by Mexicans themselves. 

Thus the barriers of Spanish political and religious 
isolation and the political and economic walls of 
the period of independence have combined to the 
narrowing of the race problem of Mexico to two 
elements — the Indians and the Spaniards who came 
during the colonial epoch. Of these the mass is 
Indian, numbering at least 6,000,000 at the time 

2 15 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of the conquest, while the leaven is the blood of the 
300,000 white men v/ho emigrated from Spain 
during the three centuries of colonial rule. At its 
close, in 1823, that rule had reduced the pure 
Indian population to 2,500,000, and had created 
at the same time nearly 2,000,000 mestizos. The 
60,000 peninsulares, or Spaniards born in Spain, 
represented, however, a greater population of 
foreign-born whites than was attained for a full 
century afterward, while the number of Creoles or 
pure white descendants of Spanish immigrants was 
the same as the average which continued down 
to the fall of Diaz— about 1,000,000. The climate, 
the early revolutions, and their economic destruc- 
tion have combined to keep down all white increase, 
a work which the Carranza revolution carried to 
the point where not only all foreigners, but the 
Creoles as well, were virtually in exile. 

All this is remarkable and significant, but obvi- 
ous, indeed. The very increase of foreigners from 
1895 to 1910, and their almost complete exodus 
since the latter year, tend to confirm, in figures, the 
absence of any real infusion of new white bloods. 
The 1910 census recorded only 120,000 foreign- 
born residents of the republic, or eight-tenths of 1 
per cent, which, excluding the 115,000 who retained 
nationality in other countries, leaves but 5,000 Mex- 
ican citizens born abroad, or three one-hundredths 
of 1 per cent.^ 



^The proportion of foreign born in the United States in 1910 was 
14.7 per cent, the great majority of whom were actual or potential 
citizens. 

16 



RACE ORIGINS 

We trace the race origins of Mexico, therefore, back 
through only the two clearly defined lines, Indian 
and Spanish. In the beginning, we must accept 
the fact that within both contributions there are 
interesting and sometimes significant variations. 
There are nearly fifty Indian tribes whose differences 
have brought interesting material to the hands of 
anthropologists. The work of the scientists, how- 
ever, has been largely with language groups, leaving 
them at a decided disadvantage in Mexico, where, 
in spite of the many Indian tribes, Spanish is over- 
whelmingly the national language. In 1910, 13,- 
143,372, or 87 per cent of the population, claimed 
it as their native tongue, and the census classifica- 
tion of forty-seven Indian language groups, and 
250 dialects, at the same tune estimated each tribe 
as at least three times the population that uses the 
Indian tongue. An increasing number of modern 
anthropologists hold that language is of secondary 
unportance in racial classifications, and it is for this 
reason, as well as because of the overwhelming use 
of Spanish, that it is touched on Hghtly here. 
Certainly the use of Spanish to-day bears out 
Madison Grant's dictum that "the language that 
a man speaks rday be nothing more than evidence 
that at some time in the past his race has been in 
contact, either as conqueror or as conquered, with 
the original possessors of such language."^ So, 
while the Indian linguistic families of Mexico are 
relatively pure, they do not mark the boundaries 



Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, p. 56, 
17 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of the races that speak them, nor do they indicate 
that the Indians of to-day are different from those 
whose language was displaced in ages now forgotten. 
The Indian types that belong to the soil of Mexico 
have probably been michanged through the suc- 
cessive conquests of other Indian races, and it 
seems likely that they will remain, still unchanged, 
through the passing of the Spaniards and their 
descendants of white and mixed blood. The disap- 
pearance or persistence of their language means 
little. Spanish will doubtless remain forever the 
language of Mexico, even should she slip back to 
recognized barbarism. 

For the purposes of our study, it is the whole 
vast field of Indian history that calls us, rather than 
the individual tribal contribution. If aught can 
be gained in such a work as that attempted here, 
it is because we shall have succeeded in finding and 
emphasizing the norm rather than the confusion of 
details. In the Justifiable instinct of the ordinary 
observer for this simplification, many false con- 
ceptions of pre-Spanish Mexican history have 
crept into common thought. We have become 
accustomed to see in this long period only a series 
of conquests in which each older race has been 
driven out and annihilated by newer conquerors, 
and its history as a succession of great migrations 
from the distant north, each wiping out whole 
peoples and setting up new and greater civilizations 
composed entirely of new races. 

Nothing could be farther from the actual truth. 
Jn reality ther^ are but four main strains in Indian 

18 



RACE ORIGINS 

Mexico, each with a long history. First are the 
primitive Indians of the mainland, still almost 
without culture, such as the Otomis; second the 
"wdld" tribes of northern Mexico, such as the 
Yaquis, who are related to the Apaches of the 
United States and who apparently never had con- 
tact with the sedentary tribes to the south; the 
third represented by the wonderful Mayas of 
Yucatan; and fourth the great Nahua family 
which included the Aztecs, Toltecs, and Chichi- 
mecs, the group whose history covers all the 
civilized Indian period in the Valley of Mexico. 

In a past so remote that even its written language 
is undecipherable, Yucatan, Tabasco, Chiapas, and 
Central America were populated by the Maya race, 
a people of definite culture and with characteristics 
which have inspired many theories that they 
crossed the seas from Asia or Africa or had their 
origins in a mythical Atlantis. The ruins of the 
Maya cities and the tropical pampas which were 
their cornfields are scattered from the peninsula 
of Yucatan to the Isthmus of Panama. Ruled but 
never conquered by later civilizations, their race 
strain definitely persisted, so that even to-day the 
natives of Yucatan have facial characteristics, 
color, and bodily traits which Hnk them to races, 
dark, to be sure, but suggesting a yet more ancient, 
lighter strain from Mediterranean Berbers or 
mythical Chinese. 

The Nahua peoples whom the Spaniards found 
also come of ancient stock. Our conception of 
their history is still warped by the tales of the 

19 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Spanish soldiers and priests, chronicles written by 
men who reached their conclusions through the 
hazes of partially understood languages and of their 
own religious conventions. Not only did sixteenth- 
century Christianity destroy the priceless records 
of the conquered peoples, but it injected into the 
native traditions correspondences to support the 
theological dogma that the entire human race was 
descended from a single pair of beings who lived in 
a Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia. The Spaniards, 
among other things, interpreted the Aztec tradi- 
tions of a northern origin to mean that the tribes 
which inhabited the Valley of Mexico had come in 
successive waves from the far northwest, down 
through California, Arizona, and Chihuahua, one 
of the chief reasons for this theory doubtless being 
the greater likehhood that the New World and 
Asia were united in the north than that there had 
been a connection through the broad Pacific (which 
the Spaniards early explored). The Indian legends 
did indeed tell of migrations from the north, but 
most of the landmarks of these lordly journeys 
have been identified with spots within a radius of a 
few hundred miles of the City of Mexico, or else 
with the great Nahua center far to the south. 
Moreover, archaeology has never been quite able 
to reconcile itself to a connection of the Aztecs, who 
lived in a semi-civilized state, with those untamed 
savages who peopled what is now the United States 
and northern Mexico. 

About 1000 B.C., Nahua wanderers from a far 
country, perhaps Florida, apparently did land 

20 



RACE ORIGINS 

at "Panuco" on the Gulf of Mexico, and, traveling 
slowly southward along the coastal plain, ultimately 
reached the rich fields of Tabasco and Chiapas. 
There they built a Nahua civilization which became 
predominant between 300 b.c. and 200 B.C. That 
traditional migration and the probability that, 
nearly 1,000 years later, Nahua tribes traveled 
from the Tabasco-Chiapas center as far northward 
as Zacatecas or Dui'ango and from there descended 
into the Valley of Mexico as Toltecs, Chichimecs, 
and Aztecs, are the only grounds which scientific 
research can find for the tradition of a northern 
origin. 

The cradle of all Indian civilization in Mexico 
seems to have been this same region of Tabasco 
and Chiapas. Palenque, with its widely scattered 
outposts of temple and village ruins, indicates a 
culture of relatively high rank which flourished 
about 1000 B.C. The Maya monuments in Yuca- 
tan are contemporaneous or older, and the apparent 
link between Mayas and Nahuas is explained by the 
theory that the Nahuas, after their wanderings from 
Panuco, and after building their civilization in 
Chiapas (about 200 b.c.) from there sent colonists 
into Yucatan (between 100 b.c. and a.d. 100), 
where, without destroying the more ancient Maya 
culture, they added their own and intermingled 
with the native race strains. 

Tabasco and Chiapas became, indeed, only a 
starting point for expeditions, and in the sixth or 
seventh century of our era Nahua famihes began 
the wanderings northward which ultimately brought 

21 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

them to the Valley of Mexico. On their original 
journey south from Panuco it seems that the 
Nahuas followed the eastern mountain slopes and 
coastland, but when the migrations back northward 
began a new route was chosen, apparently crossing 
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and going up the west 
coast. These migrations found their way to regions 
only a few days' journey to the north of Anahuac 
(as the Valley of Mexico was called in Indian 
tradition), and from there descended in the suc- 
cessive waves which we know as Toltec, Chichimec, 
and Aztec. By the time the Spaniards came this 
single people had stamped the entire culture of the 
Mexico which Cortez found, and were triumphant 
from the Gulf coast to the Valley of Mexico and 
beyond, either under Aztec rule or in the more 
ancient tribes which were descendants of the 
families the Nahuas left as they wandered south- 
ward from Panuco, between 1000 and 500 B.C. 

When the Aztecs first reached the Valley of 
Mexico they had become, as Bancroft expresses it, 
"first the pests of Anahuac and later its tyrants." 
Their history, their culture, and their government, 
as found and described by the Spaniards, have been 
the subject of much writing and much controversy. 
The greatness of their power and the advanced 
state of their culture are undeniable, and one of the 
most interesting features is that their state was 
founded and grew to full flowering during the cen- 
turies when Europe was plunged in the dark 
gloom of the Middle Ages. But their racial con- 
tribution, in which we are most interested here, 

?3 



RACE ORIGINS 

was not of a character to reassure us in contem- 
plating the Indian mass of Mexico then or to-day. 

The records and traditions of all the Nahua 
peoples, both in the Tabasco-Chiapas country and 
in the Mexican plateau, all indicate that their 
domination was political and cultural rather than 
racial. The tales of the events of that time deal 
with demigods, with priests, and with kings, but 
we find ourselves continually realizing that the 
common peoples of the Toltecs, the Chichimecs, 
and the Aztecs were probably indigenous tribes 
into which the Nahua blood was injected, just as 
the Spanish blood was injected centuries later. 
Each of the Nahua peoples, in its invasion of the 
Valley of Mexico, came apparently in a small group, 
and seldom as conquerors. Only the Chichimecs, 
who, according to tradition, came from the north 
(probably Zacatecas) to the number of more than 
3,000,000 men and women, besides children (doubt- 
less an absurd exaggeration), seem to have brought 
an entire tribal organization with them. The 
Toltecs, who preceded them, had come as a small 
expedition, it being recorded that the entire party 
lived in a single great house which they built at 
Tula. The Aztecs were so insignificant on their 
arrival (about a.d. 1325) that they were forced to 
live in a swamp, so that they came to be called, 
probably at the instance of some prehistoric 
jester, crane people, or waders. 

When the Toltecs came to the Valley of Mexico, 
probably about a.d. 500, they found already built 
the great pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teoti- 

23 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

huacan near where Mexico City now stands, the 
work of a yet older, though perhaps also Nahua, 
people. The Toltecs adopted the religion of the 
priests at that sacred spot, and thus in another 
way insured a race amalgamation. Kings and 
queens were obtained from neighboring tribes, and 
one of the early diplomatic crises of Mexico was 
averted when the Toltec nations invited a Chichi- 
mec king to rule over them, about a.d. 850. 

Race purity, therefore, was never an ideal in 
Mexico, and it seems inevitable for us to believe 
that in all these mixtures there was a tendency, 
which remains to this day, to reach back in race 
type to the original or autocthonous peoples who 
had lived in the territory from the earliest period. 
The physical similarities in color and physique of 
the so-called Aztec Indians of the Valley of Mexico 
to the Otomis seems proof of this. The Otomi is 
probably one of the oldest as well as the least ad- 
vanced of all the Mexican Indians, and tradition 
has it that certain groups of Otomis came down 
from the hills in Toltec times and adopted Nahua 
culture. This may well indicate that these primi- 
tive peoples were the chief basis of the peasant 
class of the Toltec and succeeding conquerors, for 
the Aztec Indian whom one now finds in Mexico 
gives as little indication of the great civilization of 
which he is theoretically the survival as does the 
modern Greek of the civilization of Pericles. 

To Mexican racial history, the Indian's chief 
contribution has been one of vital force. Maya, 
Nahua, and Spanish cultures have swept over him, 

24 



RACE ORIGINS 

used him as a stepping stone to a power they have 
held for varying periods, yet each has in the end 
fallen back, to be lost in tradition or in history, 
while the mass of the Indian, Yaqui and Otomi, 
Maya and Zapotec, and all gradations between, 
has gone on. His stolidity, his fatalism, his great 
physical endurance and resistance to the Mexican 
climate, are characteristics which undoubtedly 
belonged to him in the ages before the Spaniards 
came as truly as they mark him to-day. Repro- 
ducing with astonishing rapidity, he survived suc- 
ceeding wars and ages of slavery, breeding out con- 
querors of his own race through thousands of his 
brief generations, while in Spanish and repubhcan 
times he has been slowly recovering from the 
greatest of his enslavements. 

In the early years of the conquest, the Indians 
died off rapidly. There were great epidemics, 
there was slavery, there was a colossal misunder- 
standing of the Indians and their needs by the 
Spanish officials, and the upsetting of the customs 
of thousands of years worked sad havoc. The 
entire native culture was destroyed, their aristoc- 
racy literally wiped out, their very preponderance 
in numbers almost given over to the half-Spanish 
mestizos. 

After the first two hundred years of colonial rule, 
however, thanks to the Spanish crown and the 
Church, the Indians began rapidly recovering their 
numbers and vital force, a recovery which has con- 
tinued with little interruption ever since. By its 
very nature, the white race is more of a savior of 

25 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the lower native types than of itself, and it may 
well be that it is because he has been nurtured in 
the bosom of white civilization that the Indian 
has gained strength and learned power such as he 
never knew before, till he is to-day surging up as a 
menace to that very civilization. 

The tendency of the Mexican government system 
has been, since the time of the viceroys, consistently 
to eliminate any definite race consciousness in the 
Indian. Almost from the beginning his natural 
feeling that he was the original Mexican has been 
encouraged by his rulers, but mingled with that 
encouragement has been an emphasis on the differ- 
ence, and on the inferiority of the native to the 
white from beyond the seas. 

At times throughout Mexican history, hatred of 
the white man for this seK-assumed superiority as 
much as for his oppressions, has sprung into flame. 
Such a period is that in which Mexico is living to- 
day. The antiforeignism expressed in the ha- 
rangues of the leaders and in the Constitution of 
1917 is basically Indian and basically antiwhite. 
The Zapata phase of the revolutions of the last ten 
years was frankly and completely Indian, Zapata's 
object being, as he stated, to drive out the whites 
and mestizos and possess the rich state of More- 
los for the Indians who were its indigenous in- 
habitants. 

This is no new phase of the Mexican problem, 
for history records that the revolution of 1830 had 
for its ideal the extermination of the whites, the 
expelling of the mestizos, and the setting up of a 

26 



RACE ORIGINS 

semi theocratic empire modeled on that of Monte- 
zuma. In 1872 one of the decisive battles of 
Mexican history was fought against the Indian 
chief Lozada and 18,000 men to save the city of 
Guadalajara and the whites from extermination. 
From time to time Indian leaders, essentially Indian 
in attitude as well as race, have arisen lilce Lozada 
and Zapata, and it is probable that one of the factors 
which has so far saved Mexico from Indian domina- 
tion was the destruction of the Indian aristocracy 
and natural Indian leadership. What must we 
say, however, of the mestizo leadership which is to- 
day giving those Indian hordes voice and considera- 
tion and which seems to be tending toward an 
increasing strength and race consciousness of the 
Indian strain both in the Indians and in the mestizos 
who now possess the land? 

The white race (and we have seen that this is 
virtually all Spanish) has given to Mexico its 
language and its predominant culture. Racially, 
its chief contribution has been its part in the for- 
mation of the half-caste mestizo, and in the main- 
tenance of that remnant of white aristocracy which, 
from time to time, has saved Mexico from utter 
self-destruction. 

The white ethnic contribution came primarily 
from the conquerors, a group of three hundred ad- 
venturers recruited in Cuba, but all pure-blooded 
Spaniards. The records indicate that they came 
largely from northern Spain and that many of them 
were light-skinned and blue-eyed, as the Aztecs 
welcomed them at first as the returning fair gods 

27 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

whom legend had promised them. There is no 
doubt that Cortez's doughty soldiers mixed freely 
with the native women and early began the infusion 
of white blood. Their numbers were small, how- 
ever, and only figuratively can we trace to them the 
introduction of the Spanish strain. They were fol- 
lowed by adventurers of many types, and through- 
out the sixteenth century came thousands of young 
men of poor families as well as younger sons of 
aristocrats, to seek their fortunes. There came also 
the governing class and the soldiers. Many of these 
early adventurers, and, in fact, of the immigrants 
during the earlier colonial period, came from 
northern Spain, the Basques and Asturians being 
most numerous.^ They did not come to settle or 
to develop an unoccupied land, but to be supported 
by the labor of the Indians, and by that labor to 
wrest from the soil such riches of gold and silver as 
it might hold. As the country opened up, how- 
ever, the "men of the sword and cape" gave way 
to mechanics, tradesmen, and farmers, who pros- 
pered and increased as years went on. This 
natural evolution from adventurers and explorers 
to substantial developers of the new colony also 
brought in the criminal class, who went to Mexico 
and the other Spanish colonies in America under 
royal pardons or commutations of death sentences 
to definite terms of residence in America. Exemp- 
tion from taxation, feudal lordships to founders of 
colonies, and titles of nobility also served to swell 

^ The source material on this point has not been located. The 
authority is Ratzel, Aus Mexico, Breslau, 1878, p. 317. 

28 



RACE ORIGINS 

the colonial host to the 300,000 recorded emigrants 
to Mexico. 

Racial amalgamation had early become the royal 
and ecclesiastical solution of the problem of domina- 
tion. Beginning with the conquerors and extend- 
ing on through the entire period of Spanish rule, 
race crossings went on with increasing momentmn. 
AVhat had in the first place been merely a mis- 
cegenation of soldiers and native women, became, 
under the rule of king and Church, a settled pohcy. 
Under Charles V the legal marriage of Spaniards 
and Indian women was encouraged, for the early 
colonists did not take their women with them. In 
addition to the king's desire to infuse Spanish blood 
into Mexico, doubtless with the idea of ultimately 
making the population white, the Church especially 
encouraged the race-crossing, in order to hasten the 
true Christianization of the people. Not alone 
was the marriage of Spanish men and Indian women 
encouraged, but when later the Spanish women 
began to go to the colonies, their marriage with 
Indian aristocrats was sanctioned by the king and 
urged by the Church. Thus, the Indian strain 
was brought into the white race, and the amalgama- 
tion went on with tremendous impetus, a process so 
complete and rapid that a descendant of Monte- 
zuma finally became a viceroy of Mexico. Indeed, 
to this day when an Indian family rises in the social 
scale it almost invariably crosses by marriage with 
whiter mestizos, and finally with the Creoles. For 
instance, Benito Juarez, the only true Indian presi- 
dent of Mexico, married a woman of the upper 

29 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

class. Her mother was an Italian, and their de- 
scendants married as follows: his son, a French- 
woman; his five daughters, three Spaniards, a 
Mexican, and a Cuban; all of Juarez's grand- 
children married whites. 

The fact that the Spanish immigrants united 
racially with the natives instead of driving them out 
and possessing their land as the Anglo-Saxon colo- 
nists in the northern part of the continent did, was 
due to the nature of both Indians and Spaniards. 
The Indians of Mexico were a sedentary, semi- 
civilized type, ready and willing to change masters 
and to continue the labor to which they had been 
inured for centuries, while the Indians of the north 
were wild, untamed savages, hopeless as a con- 
tributing element to any civiUzation. The Puri- 
tans, moreover, had no desire to spread their faith 
among the Indians, and the colonists were them- 
selves workers who found a climate similar to that 
in which they had been born, while the Spaniards 
in the south were imbued with a spirit of religious 
conquest, and were neither desirous nor able to 
perform manual labor in the unsuitable tropical 
chmate of Mexico. The result of the situation of 
the Indians and the Spaniards in Mexico inevitably 
produced an aristocracy, and an aristocratic system, 
just as the methods of colonization of the Puritans 
produced a pure democracy. 

These ideas of aristocracy have persisted in 
Mexico to this day, and one of the disturbing factors 
at the present time is that even in the great class of 
mestizos no true democracy has ever been possible, 

30 



RACE ORIGINS 

although, had it been possible in this class, democ- 
racy might well have been the pohtical salvation 
as well as the political battle cry of Mexico. But 
the mestizo, inheriting his sense of aristocracy from 
his white father, despising the Indian and the work 
which to hun was the destiny of the Indian alone, 
attempted to preserve the idea of aristocracy which 
was founded on white superiority in race, educa- 
tion, and culture. This was complicated in the 
caste organization by the fact that in the mingling 
of the Spaniard and the Indian the first offspring 
already had a Ughter sldn and often predominating 
European features, and in the first or second genera- 
tion many of the purely physical features of the 
Indian tended to disappear. The mestizo came to 
consider himself as one of the privileged classes, 
although the Em-opeans and the Creoles always 
looked down upon him, just as he looked down on 
the pure-blooded Indian. 

The usual metaphor in the discussion of the fusion 
of races and the evolution of a national type is 
that of the melting pot. There is a melting pot of 
Mexico, but it reminds one of the caldrons where the 
mixture slowly divides itseK into varying levels in 
which each element tends rather to agglomerate 
with its own kind than to the creation of a fused 
aUoy. The racial product of Mexico has always 
partaken of one of the two cultures, Indian and 
Spanish. Seldom, even to the eye of the casual 
observer, and never to him who studies it deeply, 
does Mexico manifest racially or culturally any 
type of man or thought distinct from those two 

3 31 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

from which the mixture sprang. Those who see 
in Mexico a land of progress and vast possibilities 
find the culture and the ideals of Spain dominating 
a people emerging under the benign sun of modern 
civilization and progress; those who are less san- 
guine see the underlying inert yet dominant mass 
of Indian pulling European culture and blood down 
into dark abysses. The hope of Mexico has always 
been the adaptation of the white man's culture to 
the Indian's needs; the despair of Mexico has 
always been the crucifixion of the white man's 
culture upon the cross of Indian barbarism. 

For that Indian type seems to have maintained 
itself always at its lowest level. The ancient race 
which built the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the 
Toltec culture which flourished at Tula, the Chichi- 
mecs who carried on the torch, and the Aztecs who 
created a civilization which astonished even the 
Spaniards, were all lost in the end in a sea of uncul- 
tured humanity. 

What appalls us to-day as the underlying, de- 
pressing, almost hopeless Indian apathy of modern 
Mexico is the same unruffled sea in which the 
civilizations of Indian antiquity have, in succession, 
plunged to annihilation and obscurity. The his- 
tory of Mexico is the history of rising civilizations 
and of their ultimate and complete disappearance. 
These disappearances we persist in attributing to 
racial disintegrations (due to climate or what not) 
which weakened the entire people so that they fell 
an easy victim to the warlike strength of the 
invaders, which was manifested, we are sure, in 

32 



RACE ORIGINS 

great massacres. Yet the fact remains that from 
the tenth centm-y of our era, when the Chichimecs 
came down from the north to overwhelm the Tol- 
tecs and found their outlying cities and villages 
and at last their great capital at Tula deserted and 
falling into ruins, to the j^ear of grace 1920 when 
a bloodless revolution overturned the Carranza 
rule, the warhke attributes of the Mexican people 
have been expended in banditry, in raids, and in 
rows between minor leaders, and the great events 
of Mexican history have been achieved almost 
without bloodshed and, what is more significant, 
without any destruction of the masses of the 
people. In other words, Mexican history seems 
to have been a record of succeeding dominations 
following one another, not because of the strength 
of new armies, but because of the weakness of the 
older leaders. 

Always has remained that great, dark sea of 
the imthinking Indian. Upon its shores have 
been built the civilizations of succeeding cultures. 
Against civihzation's walls have always beaten the 
slow, disintegrating waters of its apathy, until those 
walls have crumbled to the sands upon which they 
were built. The civilizations which have suc- 
ceeded have been those which hierarchies and dynas- 
ties from beyond its borders have erected through 
long ages. Can we say, then, that this Indian 
sea, eternal, apparently unchanging, has to-day 
been transmuted at last by the infusion of a few 
thousand white men into its turgid waters, or by a 

civilization of white men built upon its shores? 

33 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Europe has taught us many lessons in the past 
five years, and perhaps the greatest of these lessons 
is that the white man's civilization is no more per- 
fect and no more eternal than the civilizations 
which have preceded it down the long corridors of 
our history. With foundation stones hewn by 
Assyrians and Greeks, Egyptians and Romans, we 
built a structiu-e which crmnbled under the blows 
of our own family quarrels, a destruction that 
laid bare to our eyes the sands, forever shifting, 
forever urging upward, of a deep, dull race heritage 
from neolithic barbarians, sands in which we are 
to-day seeking new foundations for a new world. 
Can we then dream that our white man's civiliza- 
tion can have marked an alien people, such as the 
Indians of Mexico, so deeply that it shall not follow 
the flight into the dim chambers of Indian tradition 
of civilizations which their own people built upon 
their own native culture? 

Must we not rather seek some other means than 
racial amalgamation, some more direct and definite 
system of white domination, founded deeply in 
white superiority and the white world's vital need 
of control of Mexico and her resources in the 
coming struggle for the shores of the Pacific? We 
pass now to a brief study of the greatest experiment 
the world has ever known in the fusing of two 
widely separated races — the making and the un- 
making of the mestizo ''race" of Mexico. In its 
story there is much to illuminate us; in its failure 
there is appalhng warning and significant suggestion. 



Ill 

THE MELTING POT 

EVERY phase of Mexican history and every 
Mexican problem has its race correspondence. 
Even so economic a matter as the land question 
resolves itself in the end into the difference be- 
tween European and Indian ideas of property. 
The failure of the internal financial systems seems 
directly traceable to the difference in race concep- 
tions of what wealth is. The very police power of 
government is warped and twisted by these same 
divergences, and the struggle between aristocracy 
and demagogy harks back directly to the confusing 
similarities and differences of Spanish hidalgo and 
Indian cacique. Every revolution has had its 
race determinants. The struggle between Church 
and state in the bloody '^Wars of Reform" was 
in essence a conflict of whites and mestizos, and 
throughout all Mexican history the momentous 
changes of public mind and of systems of govern- 
ment, and revolutions great and small, can all be 
traced, through one line or many, back to basic 
race determinants. Through long history this 
struggle has gone grimly on. Mexico's wars have 
passed by other names, her revolutions have voiced 

35 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

high-sounding battle cries which have deceived 
even herself, but, underneath, the struggle has 
been one of race and the cultures and institutions 
of race. 

The preceding chapter set down something of the 
origins and contributions of the two primary race 
strains in Mexico, Indian and Spanish. Our way 
now leads us to the field where those two meet, 
mingle, and resolve themselves again — the racial 
realm of the mestizo, the mixed blood, the half 
breed. 

Some illumination at the outset can be gained 
from a comparison of Mexican official estimates of 
the percentages of the various strains in the popu- 
lation, with the actual figures which those per- 
centages w^ould represent: 





PERCENTAGES 


APPROXIMATE NUMBERS 


YEAR 










White 


Mestizo 


Indian 


White 


Mestizo 


Indian 


15191. 






100 






6,000,000 


1803 . . 


17 


36 


47 


1,060,000 


2,000,060 


2,500,000 


1810.. 


18 


22 


60 


1,080,000 


1,320,000 


3,600,000 


1844 2. 


4 


to 


60 


3,000,000 


4,500,000 


1876 . . 


18 


46 


36 


1,721,000 


4,370,000 


3,420,000 


1884 . . 


10 


55 


35 


1,050,000 


5,775,000 


3,675,000 


1905 . . 


15 


50 


35 


2,100,000 


7,000,000 


4,900,000 


1910.. 


19 


43 


38 


2,850,000 


6,450,000 


5,700,000 



1 Cortez estimated the Indian population at 30,000,000, a 
figure which is here arbitrarily reduced. See p. 56. There was 
no racial census previous to Humboldt in 1803. 

2 The racial estimates of 1844 did not separate whites and 
mestizos. 



The statistics of Mexico are notoriously inac- 
curate, and although this table is doubtless far 



36 



THE MELTING POT 

from the actuality, it indicates two things, first a 
desire, from time to time through Mexican history, 
to emphasize one or another strain at the expense 
of the remaining two, and, second, the undoubtedly 
steady growth in numerical preponderance of the 
mestizo. A truer conception of the race situation 
will be obtained if we eliminate most of the table 
and compare Himiboldt's figures of 1803 (undoubt- 
edly far more accurate than any subsequently 
compiled by the purely Mexican censuses) with 
what seems by the tests of education and social 
class, a fair revision of the 1910 figures to a less 
lordly preponderance of white blood. The signifi- 
cant figures then read : 



YEAR 


PERCENTAGES 


APPROXIMATE NUMBERS 


White 


Mestizo 


Indinn 


White 


Mestizo 


Indian 


1803 . . . 
1910... 


17 
8 


33 
52 


47 
40 


1,050,000 
1,150,000 


2,000,000 
8,000,000 


2,500,000 
6,000,000 



These estimates of the racial situation in 1910 
are founded on the obvious facts that the whites 
have for over one hundred years been deprived of the 
support of continued immigration such as they en- 
joyed during the Spanish rule, have been reduced 
by exile and massacre during the early and recent 
revolutions, and have also steadily lost in numbers 
under the unfriendly Mexican clunate. The ar- 
bitrarily reduced figures for whites are brought 
nearer harmony wdth the Mexican census, more- 
over, by the addition of 1,000,000 of mestizos of 

white culture and light skins, who, though "white," 

37 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

nevertheless cannot rightly be included among the 
pure bloods.^ 

Seeking out the social values possessed by each 
of the three race elements, we find them officially 
tabulated as follows: 



Importance in 
Population 


Economic 
Resources 


Sociological 
Importance 


Selective 
Animal Force 


Mestizos 
Natives 
Creoles 


Creoles 
Mestizos 
Natives 


Mestizos 
Natives 
Creoles 


Natives 
Mestizos 
Creoles 



This table was published in the Boletin de Agri- 
cultura, in 1911, at which time the Creoles were 
overwhelming in economic resources, and when, of 
course, the mestizos were preponderant in numbers. 
The placing of the mestizos first in ''sociological 
importance" is more significant of the mental atti- 
tude of the compilers of the table than of the 
unvarnished facts. The culture and institutions of 
Mexico are white — or they are Indian; the mestizo 
has nothing of his own to contribute, and either 
emphasizes the white as he did under Porfirio Diaz 
or rides in a wild orgy of Indianism as he is doing 
to-day. Moreover, observation (there are no statis- 
tics) and comment of many students leads to the 
conviction that the fighter mestizos are of little 
importance in industrial production and except as 
a small bourgeois ''middle class" have fittle separate 
economic influence. The Indian, either as a pure 
blood or as a dark mestizo, is the predominating 
factor in agriculture and industry. The pure- 

iSee page 200. 

38 



THE MELTING POT 

blooded Indian is the basis of the rural population, 
and the mestizos, particularly those of the Indian 
type, are the industrial workers of the cities and 
nunes. 

Not only is the pure white unfit for manual labor, 
but the mixed blood, almost in direct ratio to the 
predominance of the white strain, is physically 
weaker and physically less resistant to climatic 
conditions than his more Indian brother. This 
seems fujrther demonstrated by the fact that the 
white man, including the American farmers who 
in small colonies distributed themselves in various 
sections of Mexico toward the end of the Diaz 
regime, has never been a continuous worker in the 
fields, and practically all foreign colonization 
schemes have fallen down before the competition 
of the cheaper peon labor. 

Of more significance in the social classifications 
above, however, is the placing of the Indian as the 
primary factor in '^ selective animal force.'^ 

For many generations, the Indians increased in 
numbers very slowly, while the mestizos rapidly 
became the overwhelming element in the popula- 
tion; but, on the other hand, in numbers and pro- 
portion the pure whites have fallen far below the 
average increase in the total population of Mexico, 
barely holding their own even in numbers. More- 
over, the Indians since 1810 have increased almost 
as rapidly as the mestizos. With his short genera- 
tions and his adaptabihty to tne Mexican climate, 
the Indian contribution to the mestizo is overwhelm- 
ingly one of vital force. This official classification 

39 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

brings us definitely to the question which we must 
now face, the question of the racial place of the 
mestizo. 

For what is this mestizo? Is he race or mongrel? 
Is he a half-breed, with all the half-breed's un- 
certainties, temptations, and confusions, or is he, 
as the mestizo propagandists insist, the precursor 
of a new race? There are two phases of the ques- 
tion, first the actual blood mixture and its tenden- 
cies, and second the historical background, with its 
very great significances. 

Primarily in the matter of blood mixture is the 
fact that the mestizo is reproducing from within 
his own group. Less than hah a milHon, and 
probably not more than 300,000, white men have 
contributed to Mexico's race type in the 400 years 
of her history, and although the first whites crossed 
freely with the Indians, the number of these primary- 
crossings has been rapidly decreasing, so that the 
numbers and proportion of what we may call 7ieiD 
mestizos has become less with each generation. 
To-day it is safe to estimate that not 1 per cent of 
the hving mestizos is the result of first crossings of 
whites and Indians. This ''new race" has then 
been perpetuating itself, and demonstrating a 
remarkable vitality under the conditions of life in 
Mexico, a vitality greater than that of the white 
and at least equal to the Indian's. This is taken 
by the advocates of the new race as proof of the 
permanence of the mestizo mixture. But the 
rapid reproduction of the human hybrid may be 
accepted, and as already pointed out, the vital 

40 



THE MELTING POT 

force of the mestizo is also directly traceable to the 
Indian strain. 

The reproduction of the mestizos within their 
own group, however, brings them definitely under 
the segis of the laws of inheritance of type tenden- 
cies. This would lead us to expect them to show 
signs of division into the primal race types, and 
indeed there are signs that the once-blended mes- 
tizos are now dividing into light and dark groups. 
There are as yet very few statistics or records of 
hiunan race inheritances even in definite families 
in any portion of the world, and in Mexico there 
are none. We cannot actually prove, therefore, 
that the Mendelian law of reversion into primal 
types is in action among the mestizos, but observa- 
tion and the statements of the Mexicans themselves 
certainly indicate that it is at work in the mixed 
breed of Mexico as relentlessly as in the guinea pig 
of the laboratory. ^ 

It was of record during the Spanish regime that 
where negroes and Spaniards crossed there was 
likely to be the reversion to type which was called 
the salto atras (jump back) to the negro — that is, 
the same phenomenon which appears from time to 
time in families of almost white octoroons in the 
United States. The Spaniards noted also that, while 
the Indian strain persisted only through the second 
crossing with the pure white, negro traits lasted 
to the third crossing — that is, to the octoroon — 
and a Chinese crossing was visible even into the 
seventh generation. The mestizos take it as proof 
of a race blending that the sudden reversion or 

41 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

salto atras to the lower race type was never re- 
corded from the crossings of Indian and Spaniard, 
but this may well have been due to the difficulties 
of observation of any but the upper classes, and 
also to the frequent darkness of the Spanish skin 
and the absence of blue eyes. There has been 
practically no recorded observation on this point 
in the period following the Spanish rule, the period 
when the increasing proportion of mestizo inter- 
breedings and the lessening number of new mestizos 
would have made the records of great value. 

The Spaniard is seldom a true blond, and the 
blond would almost alone attract common atten- 
tion in any reversion of the mixed blood to the 
types of his ancestors. Where whites of north 
European ancestry have crossed with Indians, 
there are often surprising and ludicrous reversions 
to type. In mining camps such as Pachuca and 
Zacatecas, where Cornish miners were brought over 
early in the last century to install pumps in ancient 
workings, one sees again and again Mexicans (now 
in the third or fourth generation from a white 
ancestor) who live as the lowest peons, and who 
have no knowledge of British ancestry, and yet 
whose skin is fair, whose eyes are blue, and whose 
hair and beard are light. In the state of Chiapas 
there is a well-known example in the family of Mac- 
Gregors. Several brothers of the name came to 
the country about 1840 and married with mestizos 
and Indians. In the legitimate line there are 
today many score of MacGregors, bearing the 
Scotch surname, and of these the preponderant 

42 



THE MELTING POT 

type is almost completely Indian, yet in these 
Indian families (or dark mestizos, as they are 
called) there occm* at intervals tall, blond Scotch 
types who speak no word of English and live as 
the mestizos of their community. This isolated ex- 
ample would suggest that the mestizo, in his inbreed- 
ing, is following Mendelian law, which, in these later 
generations, would manifest this exact phenomenon, 
the breaking up of the mixed-color peoples into their 
original racial types, with an ever-increasing num- 
ber of pure types of the darker or lower, and there- 
fore more deeply rooted, native strain. 

In many families of upper-class mestizos one 
often finds a single member with either a far lighter 
or a far darker skin than his brothers and sisters, 
and the same phenomenon is also found' in families 
of servants where similar observation is possible. 
As a rule, however, when we go into the lower classes 
the overwhelming number of illegitimate births, 
and the fact that the children of one low-class 
woman may each have had a different father, not 
only comphcates observation, but it also furnishes 
a convenient explanation of the appearance of 
darker and lighter types on the old theory of 
mixing races as one mixes paints. 

A fertile field, and a field of vast importance, 
awaits the ethnologist in the study of the mestizo, 
for the racial history of Mexico seems to be sup- 
ported by other experiences of higher race domina- 
tion versus lower race persistence.^ The new con- 

^ Cf . Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and 
liOthrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (1920). 

43 



• THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

ception of anthropology of which Mr. Grant is the 
sponsor faces resolutely the fact of this racial 
resistance of a well-acclimated population to any 
and almost all incursions of foreign blood. 

In Mexico the mixture of red and white races 
was more complete and in greater numbers than 
in any other of the Spanish colonies, and the ap- 
parent reversion in race type and in culture to the 
Indian would seem to confirm the tendency toward 
the ultimate leveling of the mixed population to the 
lower, more deeply rooted indigenous race. When 
anthropologists finally come to devote themselves 
to a thorough study of this most interesting and 
apparently complete mixture of two races in num- 
bers that are overwhelming, we may look not only 
for important illumination on the subject of Mende- 
han tendencies in the human race, but also for facts 
which may well be so significant as to determine the 
course of future policies toward Mexico, both in 
education and in politics. 

Inevitably, our study of the interaction of the 
races leads us to a racial interpretation of Mexican 
history. Recent tendencies, fitting themselves to 
the events of the past, divide the story of Mexico 
into three distinct, if overlapping, periods: the 
era of white domination, the upsurgence of the 
mestizo, and the rising sea of the Indian. The 
background is, of course, Indian. The white domi- 
nation followed, and continued through the colonial 
regime and into the revolutionary period preceding 
Diaz, when the mestizo element came in forcefully, 
but without quite destroying the hold of the white 

44 



THE MELTING POT 

culture, which flowered again during the Diaz 
peace. The mestizo advance was only interrupted, 
however, and its upsiu-gence finally overthrew the 
white rule of Diaz, continuing until the fall and 
death of Carranza, when the Indian again took 
control, a control increasing with the momentum 
of primal race tendencies in the lowering type of 
mestizos who have had charge of the government. 

The first of these historical phases, the physical 
and mtellectual domination of the white, began with 
the conquest in 1521. It extended uninterruptedly 
untn 1823, when the Spaniards were finally ex- 
pelled, to be followed some years later by most of 
the Creole aristocracy. The period of complete 
white domination was revived after the second 
election of Porfirio Diaz to the presidency, in 1884, 
when he recalled the Creoles to aid him in the 
problems of government. Actual white domina- 
tion then continued into the middle of the Madero 
regime in 1912, when the mestizo again assumed 
command, politically and culturally. 

The Spanish conquerors saw, not only political 
control, but racial domination, and vaguely ex- 
pected Mexico to become some sort of white man's 
country with a red population ever lessening with 
the spread of Christianity and the dilution of 
the native blood. The Spanish population ap- 
proxunately trebled itself in pure bloods in three 
centuries; in addition it multiplied itself almost 
seven times in the mestizo community. The 
astonishing rapidity of the mixture of the white 
with the Indian gave a false appearance of white 

45 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

racial domination, an appearance which lasted 
continuously until the whites were driven out 
during the revolutions of the nineteenth century. 

The white political and intellectual control of 
Mexico did not pass immediately with the success 
of the revolution, for the idea of white superiority 
was deeply embedded in the Indian and mestizo 
mind. The conquest was a conquest of white 
men, which Cortez had accomplished through his 
control of his Indian allies, and the Spaniards main- 
tained their intellectual hold upon the mass through 
the colonial period and even after the revolution was 
actually accomplished. The revolution of 1810 
was a rising of the Indians, and 80,000 of the aborig- 
ines marched on Mexico City, but it was not until 
the white Creoles took hold upon of the rebellion that 
it achieved its triumph in 1823. It was then only 
through the training which the whites gave the 
mestizos that the latter finally became sufficiently 
cohesive to take the revolution into their own 
hands, and, with the revolution, the government 
and control of the Indian population. 

In spite of the exile of the whites and the horrors 
of the long wars previous to Diaz, the spirit of 
Mexico did not then eliminate white ideals with any 
of the definiteness which has marked their elimina- 
tion since 1912. Porfirio Diaz postponed the final 
upheaval of the mestizos and saved one generation 
of his country for a glorious history by recalling 
the whites to assist him and to mark his administra- 
tion for the admiration and praise of the world. 
As we see it now, the rule of Diaz was a harking 

46 



THE MELTING POT 

back to the fundamental strength of white political 
science and government, differing from the best 
phases of Spanish colonial control only in the 
presence of the mestizo dictator in place of the 
Spanish viceroy, and the broader, more modern 
vision which welcomed white foreigners of every 
nationality. 

Mexico mider Diaz continued a land with a 
white cultural background and with race conven- 
tions which should tend, as the Spaniards had 
hoped, and as the Mexicans of that day fondly 
deluded themselves into beheving, to create a 
Mexican type as true and as constructive as the 
American of to-day. That dream of the Spaniards 
that their race might form a white nation in the 
Western World is to-day but a memory and a dream 
of the sentimentalist. In the course of the political 
struggles of the last decade the mestizos have 
driven out practically all of the white foreigners, 
and the overwhelming majority of their own white 
peoples, until to-day there are fewer white men 
within the confines of the RepubUc of Mexico than 
there have been at any time since the first ship- 
loads of Spanish colonists landed at Vera Cruz. 
Mexico has ceased, for the m-oment at least, to be 
a white man's country, and the struggle which is 
going on to-day, with its intense personalisms and 
its utter disregard for cultural and international 
obUgations, is developing with each new revolution 
into more and more of the age-old battle of the 
dark races against the white. 

The second phase of Mexican racial history is 

4 47 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

this upsurgence of the mestizo, reaching back, of 
course, into the Spanish regime, but coming into the 
open in 1823, achieving its object under Madero, 
and lasting until the fall of Carranza and his murder 
by an Indian revolutionary '^ general" in 1920. At 
this latter date the untamed forces of Indianism 
which the mestizos loosed and loosed anew in each 
of their revolutions, combined at last with the 
growing realization that the mestizo was not a 
white man to overthrow the last pretense of mixed 
white political control in the country. 

The political power of the mestizos dates from 
the revolution when, raised by the Creoles out of the 
degradation of ''caste" to positions of power, they, 
by new uprisings, took matters into their own 
hands. This political control began the elimination 
of the whites, who would normally have been driven 
out in the middle of the last century as they were 
in other Latin-American countries. Diaz, as we 
have seen, brought a revival of white government, 
but under him the mestizos gained new political 
education and came into a new race consciousness 
(distinct from the anti-Spanish consciousness of the 
middle of the last century). From this race con- 
sciousness came, under the white rule of 1884 to 
1910, the proud assertions of the creation of the 
"new Latin- American race," which finally resulted 
in the overthrow of the white aristocratic rule of 
Diaz. 

The revolution, of 1910 was the upheaval of mes- 
tizo intellectuals who had awakened and harnessed 
the always slumbering Indian discontent to the 

48 



THE MELTING POT 

destruction of the white civilization. In the ten 
years which have followed, the mestizo has shown 
the Indian that the white man was at least not 
invincible, but the Indian has also learned through 
mestizo ineptitudes, mestizo oppressions, and finally 
through mestizo weaknesses, that the white blood 
in his half-breed brother lacks even the stability 
and reliabiHty which characterized the ''oppres- 
sors" of colonial days or Diaz regime. Slowly it 
began, but to-day the tide is coming with a rush 
which we shall feel more forcibly as time goes on — 
unless the white man again takes control. 

This brings us to the third phase of the creation 
of the Mexican national type, the resurgence of the 
Indian. It has been in slow process through all 
Mexican history, for the Indian has been used time 
and again as the weapon of all the warring factions 
of Mexican revolutions, and it was inevitable that 
he should in the end realize his own strength. 

President Victoriano Huerta gave voice to the 
basic tenets of the Indian resurgence in 1914 in 
these words: "The Mexican situation can never be 
settled by placing the Indian of the soil in a subor- 
dinate position to people of other and more pro- 
gressive races."^ The final deathblow to the 
mestizo domination and perhaps to all white or 
near-white control in Mexico from within herself, 
was given by the Carranza constitution of 1917, 
wherein the fair words of the white man's democ- 
racy and the white man's socialism were bent to 

1 Message of Charge-d' affaires Nelson O'Shaughnessy, to United 
States State Department, February 22, 1914. 

49 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the expression of Indian antiforeignism, commun- 
ism, and license to loot and kill. 

In the Spanish conquest of Mexico the Indians 
who fought beside Cortez were his army and not 
mere allies, a control of brains and generalship and 
not a surrender of control by the brain to the brute 
force of the mass. The revolution of 1810, origi- 
nally an Indian uprising, was a failure until the Cre- 
oles took command. Soon, however, the whites 
had come to be almost the tools of the insurgent 
mass, and to that mass the scepter of control soon 
passed. It was the mestizos who grasped it and 
held it until Diaz came. But in the end Diaz, 
then Madero, then Huerta, were driven out by 
Indian armies led by mestizo rebels and bandits. 

Carranza followed in the same procession, but 
with his passing there uprose through the mestizo 
leadership a stronger tide of Indianism than had 
yet been manifested upon the surface of Mexican 
affairs. This tide is rising in two waves. One 
wave is spiritual, in the conflicting nature of the 
mestizo, whose white pride and arrogance are all 
that are left of his European heritage, while the 
red man's cruelty and unthinking grasp of imme- 
diate advantage are becoming more and more the 
outstanding characteristics of Mexican leaders. 
The other is the actual physical and political con- 
trol which the Indian element is exercising, a 
change which has been going on so rapidly that a 
world still clinging to the idea of slow adaptations 
has as yet taken no cognizance of it. 

In the preceding chapter we discussed the con- 

.^0 



THE MELTING POT 

tribution of the red man and the white to Mexico's 
racial melting pot. But what of the contribution 
of the melting-pot, the mestizo? Our first instinct 
is to say that such a question is unfair, and yet it is 
not unfair because the mestizo himself demands 
that that contribution be considered. He states 
that the idea of nationality in Mexico sprang from 
the mestizo and from the mestizo alone. He 
holds that the mestizo has given to Mexico such 
understanding as she has so far manifested of her 
pecuHar racial and social problems. He insists 
that the mestizo gave Mexico independence, and 
that the mestizo's contribution to the solution of 
poUtical and social problems in Latin-America is 
definitely as great as the contribution of the mixed 
races of the United States. 

The mestizo has indeed made Mexican history, 
but he has made it as an expression of his own 
warring tendencies. The mestizo is the product of 
Indian and Spaniard, and as such has within his 
soul the factors of both seeking always a level be- 
tween the two. So eminent a INlexican authority 
as Vicente Rivas Palacio has written in his monu- 
mental volume of Mexico a Traves de los Sighs: 

The mestizos liad become audacious, intriguing, and turbu- 
lent. They saw in the future a division among the Spaniards, 
and a hope for their rise. 

Francisco Bulnes, fascinating, humorous, epigram- 
matic, yet always sound, writes: 

The mestizo has inherited some of the quahties and faults 
of the Spaniards of the early days. He is vain and brave, but 

51 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

he is not superstitious, nor is he deceitful in swearing allegiance 
to his king, his ladies, his God, as the Spaniard did. The 
mestizo is polygamous, unfaithful to all the ladies, to his gods 
and his kings. He is skeptical, disinterested as the Indian, but 
he has one great virtue, he envies no one. He loves the rights 
of man without knowing what justice is; he loves his country 
and has the true sentiment toward a great nation; he is faith- 
ful as an Arab when it has to do with a promise to fight, and 
is as informal as an astrologist when he promises to pay his 
debts. In matters of money he neither collects, loans, nor 
pays; he hates usiny, soap, the external and internal use of 
water, combs, economy, and the gachupines (his name for the 
Spaniards)." ^ 

His cultural chaos, which is sociological more 
than educational, has been described by F. Garcia 
Calderon, a Peruvian diplomat, as *'an inferior 
Latinity, verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, ora- 
torical exaggeration. . . . The half caste loves grace, 
verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form. 
... In religion he is skeptical and indifferent, and in 
politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No 
one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish 
forefather, stoical and adventurous." ^ 

Thus the half-caste is condemned out of the 
mouths of his own people, and yet he, and the rest- 
less, destructive character which distinguishes him, 
are the product of the racial and historical elements 
of his country. In the colonial regime he was 
despised by his Spanish father and in turn looked 
down upon his Indian mother and his Indian half- 

1 Francisco Bulnes, El Porvenir de las Naciones Hispano-Amerir 
canas, p. 30. 

2 F. Garcia Calder6n, Latiii America, Its Rise and Progress, 
pp. 351-352. 

52 



THE MELTING POT 

brothers. Envious of the luxury of the Spaniards, 
physically unfit for the labor which he despised, 
literally a member of a caste of pariahs under the 
colonial system, he found the only fields of activity 
which were open to him to be the flattering of the 
Spaniards of wealth and of power, and the stirring 
up of the Indians into followings which gave him 
what may be described as a nuisance value. The 
earlier wars of the revolution were fought chiefly 
by mestizo chieftains, first with Creole leaders, and 
later with men of their own class who rose rapidly 
as opportunity came, and, by flattering and aiding 
their Creole countrymen, attained positions from 
which they later issued the edicts of abandonment 
against those same Creoles. 

Since his rise as a governing power in Mexico, 
the mestizo has absolutely destroyed all color 
distinctions, so that in Mexico we have the apothe- 
osis of the ideal expressed in terms of idealism of 
the early Spanish missionaries, who insisted that 
the mestizo was as good a Catholic, and therefore 
as good a Spaniard, as the colonists from the home- 
land. To-day there is absolutely no color line in 
Mexico, a fact which has had and continues to have 
a tremendous force in the social conditions which 
we are observing. This breaking down of the 
color fine in so complete and absolute a fashion has 
characterized the Mexican people with a homo- 
geneity which, though the observers are unaware 
of the reason, has given Mexico a place in the 
curiosity and observation of the world enjoyed by 

no other Latin-American country. In this, at least, 

53 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the mestizo must be given credit for what has been 
called the idea of nationalism in Mexico. 

The attitude of the mestizo toward the Indian 
and toward the white has been the determining 
factor in Mexican history. Toward the white he 
had been vengeful and jealous, and the destruction 
of race lines was his body blow in the battle with 
his fairer-skinned adversary. Toward the Indian 
he has, as we have seen, assumed the superiority 
of the white and combined it with the craft of the 
redskin. This has developed what has been called 
"caciquism" (the craft of the cacique, or petty 
chieftain, or, in the last analysis, demagogy). 
Culturally this is in Mexico a reversion to Indian 
methods, for the Indian social organization was in 
idea that of feudal barons, and in practice that 
of petty demagogues, leading through successive 
greater chiefs to the heads of their empires. This 
caciquism is the manifestation into which the half- 
breedism of the past century has been so rapidly 
evolving since the fall of Diaz, a manifestation 
complete in the ranks of the lower bandits who 
furnish the regiments of revolutionary armies and 
progressing steadily upward to those predatory 
generals whose record has blackened Mexican his- 
tory with deeds of Indian horror and destruction, 
and who to-day are parceling out the country, 
like robber barons, among themselves. 

In ten years, under the mestizo leadership of this 
type, Mexico has wiped out practically all the gain 
of the generation of white civilization fathered by 
Porfirio Diaz. The Indian strain in the mestizo, 

54 



THE MELTING POT 

as well as the Indian strain in the composition of 
the population, is inexorably rising to the surface. 
Fifty years of civil strife previous to Diaz, although 
it was under mestizo leadership, failed to rock to 
its foundations the Spanish culture which had been 
implanted under the colonial regime, yet in a single 
decade following the Diaz surcease we have seen 
the slow-built fabric of that revived civilization 
torn to shreds, the very flesh upon which it hung 
rotted and wasted away through its own indulgence 
in its o\vn vices. The observer of Mexican affairs 
begins in his innocence with a faith in the mestizo 
and a hope for a race which he vaguely finds like 
his o\\Ti, but he ends at last as he must end in the 
face of all the facts and of the grim Indian skeleton 
that confronts him, with a realization that here is 
a problem of uplift and education and not of mere 
political democracy. He must inevitably find in 
it a problem in which for yet a little while the 
white men of Mexico itself must carry on their 
burden, to the saving of this white man's land for 
its own people as well as for the white world. 



IV 

Mexico's population 

MEXICO, with her 766,929 square miles of 
area/ one-third that of the United States, 
and twenty times that of the state of Pennsylvania, 
had in 1910 a population of 15,150,369, one-sixth 
that of continental United States, and only twice 
that of Pennsylvania. The growth of this popula- 
tion and its geographic, civic, and industrial dis- 
tribution have definite importance and bearing 
upon the life of the country. 

Mexico's fifteen millions have been attained 
through a growth perhaps slower and more painful 
than that of any other of the new nations of the 
world. The earliest official census, that of 1793, 
near the close of the colonial regime, recorded 
5,200,000 people in the country, and it has taken 
120 years for that number to treble itself, an aston- 
ishingly slow rate of growth for a land of so vast an 
unoccupied habitable area. The reports of Cortez 
carried to the king of Spain the information that 
there were 30,000,000 people in Mexico at the time 
of the conquest, a figure obviously impossible, and 
justly discounted to about 6,000,000. 

^ Anuario Estadistico (1903). 

56 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

The methods of the early census takers do not 
inspire confidence in the rehabihty of their figures, 
though Cortez produced checks and counterchecks 
against them. He asserted, for instance, that there 
were 620,000 famihes in the Valley of Mexico at 
the time of the conquest, with an average of six 
persons per family, giving the population of the 
Valley of Mexico at 3,720,000 — ^in an area as rich 
as any in Mexico, which supported slightly over 
700,000 in 1910. But Cortez did not stop there; 
he went on to assert that there were 655 towns in 
the general vicinity of the Valley of Mexico, con- 
taining 900,000 famihes or 5,400,000 persons, a 
total of 9,120,000 residents of Mexico, Texcoco, 
Toluca, and Puebla. Against this he checks the 
confirmatory record of the Church, showing that, 
between 1524 and 1540, 6,000,000 Indians were 
baptized in the Valley of Mexico alone. These 
figiu-es form the basis of the estimate of 30,000,000, 
and native historians have generally accepted them 
wdthout revision. 

To the support of Cortez they bring other con- 
firmatory '^evidence," such as the statement of the 
Spanish Captain Montando, who recorded that 800 
chieftains and 1,000,000 people greeted his party of 
explorers at Itzintzuntzan when he took possession 
of what is now the state of Michoacan. They also 
cite the colonial records that the smallpox epidemic 
of 1540 killed 1,000,000 Indians (Father Toribio 
said ''half the Indians"), that the war with the 
Spaniards took 250,000, that the matlazhuatl 

(measles or typhus) epidemic of 1545 took 100,000 

57 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

(Humboldt says 800,000), and that of 1576, 2,000,- 
000, a total of 3,350,000 deaths among the Indians 
in thirty-six years. They also bring to bear the 
Aztec records and system of government, showing 
that there were in Anahuac thirty princes, each 
having 100,000 persons under him, or 6,000,000, 
and that the nobility numbered 120,000, checking 
the previous total of 9,120,000.1 

Even if these figures were true in general, the 
glib acceptance of 30,000,000 as the Indian popula- 
tion at the time of the conquest is hardly justified, 
for, as priests and explorers later discovered, the 
population outside the Valley of Mexico in Indian 
times was exceedingly small. Yet in each of the 
records which so satisfy the Mexican statistician 
there is always a glaring point of error; one can 
hardly imagine that each Aztec Indian was satis- 
fied with one baptism, as baptisms seemed to be 
one of the things which pleased the white men, nor 
can we convince ourselves that the records of deaths 
in the epidemics are even approximately correct. 
It hardly seems likely that Captain Montando had 
an opportunity even to see 1,000,000 natives in the 
rolling hills of Michoacan, nor that there was not at 
least a doubling of count when the vassals of the 
thirty princes and the retainers of the 3,000 minor 
chieftains were listed. 

That there were great populations in Mexico 
previous to the conquest must, however, be ad- 
mitted, although they were certainly not contem- 

1 General Carlos Pacheco, Memoria as Secretary of Fomento, 
1877-82, Mexico, 1885. 

58 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

poraneoiis; even in the well-cultivated central 
portion of the country, archseologists arc continu- 
ally making new discoveries of ruins which indicate 
vast areas populated by forgotten peoples. The 
cornfields which surround the ruins of Zempoala, 
the great Indian town near Vera Cruz which greeted 
Cortez when he landed, are to this day marked for 
miles by tiny hillocks which were the foundations 
of temples and of houses; and about Teotihuacan, 
the pre-Toltec shrine where the two pyramids of 
the Sun and Moon still stand, are indications of 
uncounted villages.. The awe-inspiring ruins at 
Palenque and in Yucatan prove beyond any doubt 
the presence, long before the conquest, of a popu- 
lation which must have numbered hundreds of 
thousands. Over against this must be ranged the 
climatic situation of Mexico, and the living and 
sanitary conditions which in centuries gone by must 
have had the same depressing effect upon the 
longe\'ity of the people that it has to-day. Alcohol 
has been blamed for many of the evils of the 
Mexican Indians since the Spaniards came, as have 
the white man's diseases, which have decimated 
them from time to time, but even then it seems 
hardly Hkely that the early Indians who apparently 
had practically no sanitary laws, and who were in 
a state of almost continual w^ar, were without those 
natural checks to the growth of population which 
are omnipresent in the lives of primitive peoples. 

With all this, however, there is little ground for 
doubt that the Indian population at the time of the 

conquest was far greater than any numbers that it 

59 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

attained for many generations after. The Span- 
iards did not set about the extermination of the 
red men as did other colonists of the Western World, 
but the drastic change of conditions, the enervating 
slavery, oppressions, and abuses, and the conquerors' 
lack of understanding of native conditions, com- 
bined with natural causes to work havoc with the 
native population. Even accepting the conserva- 
tive estimate of 6,000,000 Indian inhabitants at the 
time of the conquest, we are faced with the fact 
that the first genuine census in Mexico, that of 
1793 by the Conde de Revillagigedo, showed but 
5,200,000 inhabitants, less than haK of them 
Indians. This was confirmed by the careful figures 
of Baron von Humboldt,^ who estimated that in 
1808 there were 5,837,100 inhabitants of New Spain. 
Taking both Cortez's estimate and our correc- 
tion, for 1521, and for want of statistics or estimates 
between, noting the next census as that of 1793, 
we have the following list of all official records of 
population in Mexico: 

1521 30,000,000 (Hernando Cortes) 

1521 6,000,000 (Estimated) 

1793 5,200,000 (Conde de Revillagigedo) 

1808 5,837,100 (Baron von Humboldt) 

1810 6,122,354 (Navarro y Noriega) 

1824 6,500,000 (Poinsett) 



1 Humboldt, in discussing Mexico in 1803, did not estimate 
the population at the time of the conquest. In placing the 
Indians in 1803 at 2,500,000 he remarked, significantly, "We 
have difficulty in beheving that nearly two millions and a half 
of aborigines could survive such lengthened calamities" (as were 
incident to early colonial rule) . Alexander von Humboldt, Political 
Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. i, p. 139. 

60 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

1830 7,996,000 (Burkardt) 

1S38 7,044,140 (Condc do la Cortina) 

1856 7,859,564 (Lerdo do Tejada) 

1861 8,174,000 (Garcia Cubas) 

1869 8,743,000 (Garcia Cubas) 

1871 9,176,082 (Garcia Cubas) 

1871 9,097,056 (Dept. of Government) 

1872 9,141,661 (Garcia Cubas) 

1872 8,836,411 (Manuel Payno) 

1872 8,655,553 (Congress) 

1873 9,209,765 (J. M. Perez Hernandez) 

1874 9,343,479 (Garcia Cubas) 

1874 8,743,614 (Rivera Cambas) 

1878 9,686,777 (Dept. of Government) 

1878 9,384,193 (Dept. of Government) 

1880 10,001,884 (Emiliano Busto) 

1886 10,791,685 (Von Glamer) 

1888 11,490,830 (Bureau of Statistics) 

1889 11,395,712 (Garcia Cubas) 

1890 11,632,924 (Antonio Penafiel) 

1892 11,614,913 (Dept. of Fomento) 

1895 12,619,949 (Dept. of Fomento) 

1900 13,604,923 (Dept. of Fomento) 

1910 15,150,369 (Dept. of Fomento) 

Even the censuses under President Diaz were far 
from accurate, for the system was faulty in that the 
Federal government never actually handled the 
census itself, its instructions going from Mexico 
City to the governors of the states, thence to the 
chiefs of the districts, and so on down to the heads 
of villages, and the figures returned by the same 
way, with many '' corrections" en route. The 
census of 1910 was probably the most reliable in 
its totals, but even then the carelessness of the 
officials, and the difficulties of convincing the 
Indians that the enumeration was not connected 
with possible new taxation or military service, 
brought in elements of error which were complicated 
by the crudeness of the estimates which were made 

61 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

in an attempt to balance the shortage. No census 
nor adequate estimate of population increases has 
been made since the Diaz census of 1910, and al- 
though the rate of increase was fairly estabUshed 
at 15 per cent every ten years, it is probably not 
safe to estimate that Mexico had in 1920 increased 
her legitimate 2,250,000 since 1910, as the con- 
tinual revolutions, the increasing emigration, and 
the undoubtedly great loss of life, owing to the revo- 
lutionary living conditions, has cut down the legit- 
imate increase which was recorded under the peace- 
ful regune of Diaz; present conditions might even 
show a distinct decrease. 

There are, however, certain interesting and ex- 
tremely important comparisons to be found in 
Mexican census statistics. For instance, in 1800 
the populations of the United States and Mexico 
were practically equal, approximately 5,300,000. 
In 1910 the population of Mexico was 15,000,000, 
and that of continental United States 92,000,000. 
Taking the conservative estimate of 6,000,000 
inhabitants of Mexico at the time of the conquest, 
the record then shows that Mexico had grown from 
6,000,000 to 15,000,000 in approximately 400 years, 
and the United States had grown from practically 
nothing to 92,000,000 in 300 years. In the last 
ten years previous to the census of 1910 the United 
States had gained 21 per cent and Mexico but 
15 per cent. 

The rates of increase in Mexico's population have 
been extremely erratic. Eliminating the period of 
colonial government when the Indian population of 

62 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

Mexico first decreased and then recovered rapidly, 
we find that from 1792 to 1895 the annual increase 
figures out to about 1.1 per cent, or 11 per cent per 
decade. Making allowances for all the errors of 
omission and for the bloodiest revolutionary peri- 
ods, we can place the nonnal rate of increase over 
this fu'st hundred years at about 12 per cent per 
decade. This, however, compares but feebly with 
the significant increase marked between 1890 and 
1910 when the population grew about 30.5 per cent, 
or over 15 per cent per decade. There is a yet 
more startling contrast from 1838 to 1878, the forty 
bloody years preceding the Diaz regime, when the 
increase in population was only 33 per cent, or 8.25 
per cent per decade. These were the figures avail- 
able to Bancroft,^ when he stated that ''the period 
of the independence war is generally regarded as 
stationary, but after this the increase is reckoned 
at about eight per mille" (8 per cent per decade). 
In 1803 Humboldt stated that Mexico should 
double her population every nineteen years "if the 
order of nature were not inverted from time to 
time from some extraordinary cause," and esti- 
mated, in 1803, that it was actually doubling every 
thirty-six to forty years.^ The census of 1910 
showed that Mexico, far from realizing this pre- 



^H. H. Bancroft, History of Mexico, San Francisco, 1888, vol. 
vi, page 600. In a footnote, Bancroft quotes Journadet, who as- 
sumed an "average increase of ten per mille, with a possible addition 
of two per miUe under a peaceful government," figures which the 
longer period and fuller record since 1888 indicate to be closer to 
the actual conditions. 

" Op. cit. book ii, pp. 108-109. 
5 63 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

diction, was increasing at a rate that would double 
her population every eighty years. 

While Diaz's good government undoubtedly im- 
proved on previous conditions, it was not able to 
revolutionize the important population factors of 
immigration and emigration. We cannot forget 
that there has been virtually no immigration since 
the time of the Spaniards, a condition which the 
Diaz peace, with all its prosperity and with all its 
influx of foreigners of the non-producing classes, did 
not truly remedy. On the other hand, there has 
always been a distinct Mexican emigration. 

In his famous poUtical handbook,^ Francisco I. 
Madero, later President of Mexico, stated, "Of 
all America, Mexico is the only country whose 
natives emigrate." From the very beginning of her 
history, Mexico has been a center of emigration. 
The Philippines were settled and developed by 
Spaniards and mestizos from Mexico, and for 250 
years the convoys of galleons bringing the riches of 
the Orient kept up a communication between 
Manila and Acapulco on Mexico's west coast. In 
later years there was a current of emigration to 
Florida and to Louisiana, chiefly, however, of 
Mexican Creoles. California was original^ popu- 
lated, so far as its white and mestizo peoples went, 
from Mexico. During the Spanish era, and even 
into the period of independence, Yucatan and 
other sections on the Gulf coast were centers for 
what was practically a slave traffic which carried 



^ Francisco I. Madero, La Sucesidn Presidencial en 1910, p. 189. 

64 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

the Indians to Cuba and other islands of the Spanish 
main. 

For the past twenty-five years there has been a 
steadily growing current of emigration of Mexico's 
best laboring classes to the United States, consti- 
tuting not only a population loss, but one of the 
most serious drains upon the national labor effi- 
ciency. In the mass of the immigrant labor of the 
United States, the influx of Mexicans is a small 
factor, but to Mexico the loss has been increasingly 
serious, growdng ahnost to a peril dming the revolu- 
tions of 1910-15, and increasingly through the 
depressmg years of Carranza's supposed peace. 
No figures of value have been compiled by Mexico, 
and those of the United States government natu- 
rally show only the immigrants who enter through 
the regular ports, while probably the majority slip 
across the Rio Grande Vvithout legal formalities. 

No complete records of immigration movement 
along the Mexican border were kept until 1908, so 
that the only indications we have of Mexican immi- 
gration previous to that date are the census reports 
of Mexican-born residents at ten-year intervals. 
These go back to 1850 and show a continuous aver- 
age of about 0.1 per cent of the whole population 
of the United States. For the past forty years 
these figures^ are as follows: 



1880 


1890 


1900 


1910 


Mexican-born residents of U. S. 68,399 
Percentage of total population. 0.14 
PercentageofforeignbornofU.S. 1.0 


77,853 
0.12 
0.8 


103,393 
0.14 
1.0 


221,915 
0.2 
1.6 



1 XJ. S. Census for 1910, vol. i, p. 784. 

65 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Since 1908, when complete records were begun, 
the figures of the permanent class of immigrants — 
that is, those Mexicans who, on crossing the border 
at ports of entry, declare their intention of remain- 
ing in the United States — show variations almost 
identical with pohtical upheavals and periods of 
economic stringency in Mexico. These records ^ 
are as follows, the figures being for fiscal years 
ending June 30th, the last item being for the last 
six months of 1919, or one-half the fiscal year: 

1908.. 5,682 1913.. 10,954 1918.. 17,602 

1909.. 15,591 1914.. 13,089 1919.. 28,844 

1910 . . 17,760 1915 . . 10,993 six months of 1919 . . 22,857 

1911 . . 18,784 1916 . . 17,198 (at rate of 45,000 per year) 

1912.-22,001 1917.. 16,438 

Balancing these figures are deductions to be made 
by reason of the departure for Mexico of permanent 
emigrants from the United States — that is, those 
Mexicans who return to Mexico to resume their 
residence there, though these permanent emigrants 
may not all have been classified as permanent immi- 
grants on their arrival. The latest figures on this 
point are as follows: in the year ending June 30, 
1918, the number of immigrant Mexicans admitted 
through ports of entry was 17,602, while in the 
same year 25,084 returned to Mexico, a net loss in 
the United States figures of this class of 7,482. 
(This was a period when Carranza's promises of 
peace in Mexico were most encouraging.) In the 
year ending June 30, 1919, however, while the 
number admitted was 28,844, the departures were 

1 Pata furnished by U. S. Bureau of Immigration, 

m 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

17,793, leaving a net gain of 11,051 to the United 
States population. These figures are significant 
enough, but those for the last six months of 1919 
are yet more startling. In this period the perma- 
nent inmiigration from Mexico was 22,857, while the 
permanent emigration was only 4,603, leaving a net 
gain of 18,254, or at the rate of 36,308 per year, 
over three times the rate of permanent gain to the 
United States and loss to Mexico in the year end- 
ing June 30, 1919. 

These official figures, briefed as they are, barely 
suggest the actual emigration from Mexico to the 
United States. For the entire length of the inter- 
national line there is hardly a stretch of territory 
ten miles long where a man who knows the border 
and the patrol systems cannot cross and recross 
afoot or by boat without interference. Estimates 
from the border are to the effect that in the first 
six months of 1920 fully 100,000 Mexicans crossed 
the border '^ informally," and during that period, 
a time of apprehension, of revolution and economic 
depression in Mexico, the news from border points 
spoke frequently of the amazing increase in the 
number of Mexicans arriving in the United States. 
Estimates in this matter of Mexican emigration, 
like so much that deals with Mexico, must always 
be far superior to statistics, and so long ago as 1908, 
Victor S. Clark, ^ in his important monograph on 
Mexican Labor in the United States estimated that 
the annual immigration of Mexican labor was 

1 Victor S. Clark, Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 71, Sep- 
tember, 1908, p. 466. 

67 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

probably 60,000 and "certainly not over 100,000." 
Doctor Clark's figures can well be taken as authori- 
tative, and if so, we can hardly doubt the con- 
servatism of the estimate ^ of a rate of 100,000 in 
the first six months of 1920. 

This emigration bears upon Mexico's population 
and social problems tremendously, because these 
emigrants to the United States represent the highest 
types in each of their classes. The cause for this 
movement is, of course, at its base political, because 
the economic disruption of Mexico finds its own 
som-ce in the political upheavals. President Ma- 
dero little knew, when he called attention to the 
emigration under President Diaz, that the revolu- 
tion which he inaugurated would more than treble 
his country's loss after ten years." 

The evil of emigration has long been recognized 
in Mexico, and caustic reports from consular offi- 
cers, debates in Congress, and papers by govern- 
ment officials have marked its discussion. The 
Mexican consuls in the United States sent consider- 
able information on the condition of the emigrants 
during 1919, and there was even agitation for the 
Mexican government to close the border to emigrant 
laborers. There was undoubtedly much misery 
among the emigrants, and many were deceived by 
contractors and others, a condition recognized by 
the United States immigration and consular officials, 



1 New York Tmes, June 20, 1920. 

2 The labor conditions in the United States and the opening of 
fields other than that of unskilled railway labor to the Mexican 
immigrants of course have had an effect which there is no intention 
to ignore. 

68 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

who did much to avoid such difficulties by limita- 
tion of passports, etc. However, the influence of 
the Mexicans, who, after residence in the United 
States, retiu-n to Mexico, is recognized as ultimately 
good, and a secretary of Fomento under Huerta 
officially stated that it was of advantage to the 
Mexican worlanan to live in the United States; 
Mexico should let him go, but should offer real 
inducements, in land, houses, or opportunities, to 
§et the unproved workman to return to Mexico.^ 

To balance the continually growing emigration, 
there is practically no immigration whatever into 
Mexico. Not only is this true during the present 
period, but it has been a static condition ever since 
the independence cut off the influx of white men 
from the Spanish peninsula. The population of 
foreigners in Mexico has, during the independence, 
been made up almost entirely of temporary resi- 
dents. Beyond this is the additional fact that even 
these temporary residents were executives and 
business men, and the increase of laboring popula- 
tion has been practically nil. Most of the 60,000 
Spaniards in Mexico at the time of the separation 
from Spain were diiven out, and not until after 
1900 was this number of 60,000 foreign white men 
exceeded. The 1895 census reported only 3,713 
foreigners in the Republic, but this grew until in 
1900 there were 57,508, and in 1910, 115,869. The 
following are the totals of the most important 
foreign colonies at these three periods: 

^ Boletin de la Dir. Gral. de Agricultura, November, 1913, pp. 
1201 ff. 

69 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Year 


Americans 


British Spaniards 


French 


Germans 


Chinese 


Guatemalans 


1895... 
1900... 
1910. . . 


937 
15,265 
20,507 


722 881 
2,995 16,258 
6,621 29,332 


157 
3,976 
4,340 


266 
2,565 
3,775 


74 
2,834 
13,140 


30 

5,808 

21,329 



Of these the Spaniards also furnished the bulk 
of the permanent foreign increment, and in 1910, 
of the pitiful total of 658 naturalized citizens of the 
Republic, 209 were Spaniards. Many Germans 
have also made Mexico a permanent home, and 
some of the Chinese have become Mexican citizens, 
although this is generally conceived as a means 
toward their possible emigration to the United 
States as Mexicans instead of Orientals. 

Mexico has not lived all these centuries, however, 
without definite efforts at foreign colonization. 
The history of these attempts is long, and as dis- 
couraging as it is long. The success which the 
Argentine has had in obtaining and acclimating 
immigrants from South Europe has always tempted 
Mexico, and during the time of President Diaz 
there was a more or less continuous effort to stimu- 
late similar immigration. In 1878 a plan was put 
on foot which it was fondly estimated would bring 
about 200,000 colonists to Mexico in the succeeding 
fifteen years. A total of ninety-seven contracts 
were made with various corporations and individ- 
uals for the installation of immigrant colonies. 
Practically all of these were Italian, although some 
were Spanish and a number were American. About 
11,000 Italian colonists in all were brought in, but 
in 1890 only 5,000 remained, a figure which shrank 

continuously, until under the attentions of the 

70 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

revolutionists after 1910 all the colonies were 
abandoned. The Mormons who settled in northern 
Chihuahua, with their center in the town of Casas 
Grandes, began coming in 1882, and gave great 
promise of progress and development of the section 
in which they settled to the number of over 10,000. 
In addition there were other American colonies 
about the city of Tampico, and some on the Isthmus 
of Tehuantepec. These, however, like the Mormon 
and Italian colonies of longer standing, were com- 
pletely wiped out by the outrages and economic 
disturbances of the Madero-Carranza revolutions. 

Spontaneous immigration into Mexico is and 
probably always will be of the class of men who, 
with pioneering and executive genius, develop the 
latent resources of the country, but who are seldom 
really permanent, seldom become Mexican citizens, 
and never add to the numbers of the laboring, and 
thus ultimately producing, class. 

Moving on to the distribution of Mexico's popu- 
lation within her own borders, we find, in 1910, that 
over the entire country the population density is 
about eighteen persons per square mile, including 
both rural and urban, or about the same as the 
state of Washington, contrasting with the average 
density of the population of the United States, 
which was 30.9 per square mile. There has been a 
continual shifting of Mexico's population within 
her own borders, and in the following table it may 
be taken that the distribution and density in 1889 
was about the normal for the republic after the 
artificial shifting caused by the revolutions had 

71 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

settled down under the Diaz peace. The distribu- 
tions of 1910 indicate the increasing development 
of the country as the ultimate result of the Diaz 
peace, and show the tendencies of the population 
distribution under modern development.^ 





Area 
IN Sq. 
Miles 


Population 


States 


1889 


1895 


1910 


Total 


Per 

Sq. 
Mile 


Total 


Per 

Sq. 
Rlile 


Total 


Per 

Sq. 
Mile 


Frontier States 
Chihuahua 


87.820 
62,376 
24,324 
76,922 

32,585 
29,210 
10,075 
18,091 
35,214 

33,681 
11,279 
31,8.55 
2,273 
22,081 
25,003 
36,392 
27,230 
58,345 

38,020 

24,764 

2,951 

25,323 

11,374 

3,5.58 

8,920 

9,250 

2,774 

12,207 

1,595 

463 


225,652 
150,622 
236,074 
134,790 

161,121 
621,476 
104,747 
93,976 
329,621 

223,684 

131,019 

1,250,000 

72,591 
784,108 
353,193 
768,508 
241,404 

31,167 

255,652 
465,862 
140,180 
516,486 
1,007,116 
203,250 
.506,028 
798,480 
141,665 
833,125 
138,478 
475,737 


2.6 
2.4 
9.2 
1.7 

4.9 

21.3 

10.-^ 

5.2 

9.4 

6.6 
11.6 
39.2 
31.9 
35.5 
14.1 
21.1 
8.9 
0.6 

6.7 
18.9 
47.5 
20.4 
88.5 
57.1 
56.7 
86.3 
51.1 
68.2 
86.8 
1,027.5 


226,831 
235,638 
309,607 
191,281 

204,206 
855,975 
134,794 
90,458 
297,507 

256,414 

144,308 

1,107,863 

55,677 
889,795 
417,601 
882,529 
313.578 

42,287 

294,366 
452,720 
103,645 
570,814 
1,047,238 
227,233 
648,099 
838,737 
1.59,800 
979,723 
166,803 
484,608 


3.0 

3.7 

13.1 

2.4 

6.3 

29.3 

13.3 

5.0 

8.4 

7.6 
12.8 
34.8 
24.5 
38.8 
16.7 
24.9 
11.5 

0.7 

7.7 
18.2 
35.1 
22.5 
92.1 
63.9 
61.6 
90.7 
57.6 
80.2 
104.6 
1,046.7 


405,707 
362,092 
365,150 
265,383 

249,641 

1,132,8.59 

187,574 

86,661 

339,613 

323,642 

171,173 

1,208,885 

77,704 

991,880 

594,278 

1,040,398 

438,843 

52,272 

483,175 
477,556 
120,511 
627,800 

1,081,651 
244,663 
646,551 
989,510 
179,594 

1,101,600 
184,171 
720,753 


4.6 
5.8 


Nuevo Leon 


15.0 
3.5 


Gulf States 
Tamaulipas 


7.7 

38.8 




18.6 




4.8 




9.6 


Pacific States 

Sinaloa. 

Tepic 


9.6 

15.2 




37.9 




34.6 


Michoacan 


44.9 
23.7 




28.5 




16.1 


Lower California. . . 
Central States 


0.9 
12.7 




19.3 


Aguas Calientes 

San Luis Potosi .... 
Guanajuato 


40.8 
24.7 
95.1 
68.8 




72.5 




106.9 




64.7 


Puebla 


90.2 




122.3 


Federal District. . . . 


1,556.7 



1 Data for 1889 from Matias Romero, Geographical and Statistical 
Notes on Mexico, for 1895 and 1910, calculated from census figures, 

72 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

In a general way these figures show that about 
75 per cent of the population of Mexico live in the 
central plateau, about 15 per cent in the semi- 
tropical areas, and the remaining 10 per cent in the 
hot country. The normal tendency of the popu- 
lation is to gather densely in the sections where the 
national foods and drink are produced — that is, in 
the Valley of Mexico, in Michoacan, Jalisco, etc., 
less densely about Saltillo, San Luis Potosi, and 
Aguas Calientes, where the national foods, but not 
pulque, are produced, and with less density in less- 
favored zones, until the lightest population is in 
the dry northern plateau and in the hot lands. 

The rate of population increase in the various 
sections of Mexico is illuminating, however. Re- 
ferring to the table, we find that over the twenty- 
year period, the population growth was approx- 
imately 30.5 per cent, but in the frontier states the 
net gain was 75 per cent, and in the Gulf states 52 
per cent, and yet in these two sections as a whole 
there is neither arable land nor sanitary living con- 
ditions, their growth being due to the growth of 
mining, industry, and industrial agriculture. The 
Pacific states — largely agricultural, but great pro- 
ducers of labor — fell below the average increase of 
the nation, with only 28 per cent advance, while the 
center, comprising the richest states, and the breed- 
ing place of Mexico's population for centuries, 
gained but 25 per cent, 5.5 per cent less than the 
average growth of the nation as a whole. 

The distribution of the rural population generally 

harmonizes with the population density in the 

73 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

various states, and the figures for the states may 
be taken generally as indicative of the rural popu- 
lation, for only 22 per cent of the people of Mexico 
live in cities and towns of 4,000 people and over. 
There is this element to be remembered, however, 
that the Mexicans are essentially and by instinct 
town dwellers of the most gregarious type. In the 
cities they always live in closely built houses, and 
in the country there are few isolated farms and 
ranches, practically the entire population of the 
country living in villages, the farm workers going 
out each day to their fields and returning each 
night to their homes. The rural population there- 
fore is not sprinkled over the countryside, but 
gathered into villages or haciendas. An hacienda 
is recognized in Mexico as a kind of incorporated 
town whose population may run well into the 
thousands, the people almost all living in one great 
feudal town about the hacienda buildings. The 
result of this situation is that where, for instance, 
the population is twelve per square mile, little vil- 
lages or haciendas are found every two or three 
miles along the trail, while where the density falls 
to two per square mile, a village is found only every 
ten or fifteen miles, with almost no isolated fanns or 
huts between. 

This rural population is determined largely by 
the availability and accessibility of the arable land, 
which in its turn depends on rainfall and irrigation, 
climate,^ altitude and mountain contour. 

In northern Mexico there are fewer than twelve 

^See also part ii, chap. i. "Climate." 

74 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

inhabitants per square mile, the rainfall being less 
than twelve inches per year, which is insufficient 
to water the crops. In this section, however, there 
is grazing, and from time immemorial there has 
been some irrigation, but in the genuine desert 
portions, where the rainfall is less than ten inches 
per year, the population falls to less than two per- 
sons per square mile. This most sparsely settled 
section of Mexico has about the same density as the 
purely rural population of the desert and mountain 
section of the United States, extending from Idaho 
and Montana to New Mexico, while the remaining 
portion of northern Mexico has about the same 
rural density as Washington and California. 

As a general rule an increase in the rainfall pro- 
duces a corresponding increase in population, the 
example being the Monterrey section, where the 
rural population, due to a better rainfall than in 
adjoining sections, rises to about twenty -five per 
square mile. In the more densely populated cen- 
tral plateau country of Mexico and on down the 
slopes toward the Gulf the rainfall ranges from 
eighteen to forty inches a year and falls with enough 
regularity to guarantee fair crops. The rural 
population here rises to over fifty per square mile, 
which is about the same as the Middle Atlantic 
states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, 
the most densely populated rural communities of 
the United States. About Mexico City, Toluca, 
Guadalajara, Puebla, and Morelia, the rural popu- 
lation — not counting the urban population of these 

cities^ — rises to 125 and 150 per square mile. This 

75 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

is almost as heavy a rural population as surrounds 
the larger American cities. 

Going down into the tropics, the rainfall increases, 
but soon begins to have a deterrent effect upon 
population because, owing to the extremely heavy 
precipitation, the conditions of agriculture are 
made worse, as the heavy torrents carry away the 
vegetable mold, making fertilization necessary, or 
else the continued moisture causes a rank growth 
of native vegetation which chokes out the culti- 
vated crops. Indeed, the influence of the rainfall 
on population is greatly modified by altitude, its 
effect on the density of rural population being made 
clear by a glance at the zone crossing the country 
from Vera Cruz to Manzanillo. The well-watered 
Gulf plains back of Vera Cruz are so near the sea 
level that their temperature is very high, maintain- 
ing a moist, warm jungle which makes the raising 
of food crops difficult. The rural population here 
varies from two to twelve persons per square mile. 
On the slope toward the plateau the temperature 
lowers and the rainfall, although heavy, is carried 
off in mountain streams, so that there are fewer 
swamps and jungles. The rural population in- 
creases from twelve to twenty-five about Puebla 
and Orizaba, until it reaches twenty-five to fifty 
per square mile on the plateau. This plateau can 
be taken as extending not only across the Valley 
of Mexico, but through Jalisco and Michoacan, 
where the density continues at from fifty to one 
hundred and twenty-five in the vicinity of the cities. 

On the west coast there is no coastal plain, but the 

76 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

mountain slopes and barren sands create a distribu- 
tion of population almost identical with that of the 
Gulf coast, from two to twelve per square mile. 

This influence of the highlands on the Mexican 
population is also manifested on the Oaxaca plateau, 
which, while isolated from the center, has a popu- 
lation of from twenty-five to fifty per square mile. 
The Chiapas plateau, farther south, has a density 
of about twenty-five per square mile, in contrast 
with the jungle country immediately east of it in 
Chiapas and Tabasco, and with the narrow desert 
coast lands on the Pacific side, where the density is 
two to ten per square mile. 

The peninsula of Yucatan has some parallels to 
the situation in other parts of Mexico, but also has 
certain unique features. The low population den- 
sity of Tabasco is carried eastward to the state of 
Campeche, where the ancient industries of dyewood, 
hardwood timber, and chicle gathering support a 
population of twelve to twenty-five per square mile. 
Campeche soon changes along the coast to the desert 
section of Yucatan, where, however, the henequen 
industry has created an unusually large rural popu- 
lation. The number of people per square mile in 
Yucatan varies from twelve to over twenty-five. 

These apparently sparse densities of population 
account, however, for 11,803,820 of rural popula- 
tion (in villages under 4,000 people). The town 
population (between 4,000 and 10,000) is 1,234,089; 
the city dwellers (in towns over 10,000) number 
2,171,386, the total ''urban population" being 

3,405,475, making the division, on the line of towns 

77 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of 4,000 and over, 22.4 per cent urban and 77.6 
per cent rural. 

The following table showing the interesting dis- 
tribution of these rural and urban dwellers by states 
was compiled from the data of the 1910 census: 



State 


Number of Towns 


Urban Population 


Rural 
Popula- 
tion 


4,000 

to 
10,000 


10,000 

to 
25,000 


Over 
25,000 


Towns 

over 
10,000 


Towns 

4,000 to 

10,000 


Total 
Urban 


Towns un- 
der 4,000 


Agua3 Calientes. 

Coahuila 

Lower Calif 


1 

8 
1 

'6 

6 

15 

S 

2 

19 

13 

5 

4 

13 

16 

2 

ii 

3 

3 

20 
5 
1 
4 
4 
2 
3 

18 
6 
8 


i 

3 
3 

8 

'i 

2 
4 
1 

'2 
1 

i 

2 
1 
2 
3 

i 

2 

1 
2 
1 
4 


1 
2 

i 

'3 

2 

i 

1 

"i 
1 

1 

1 

'i 

'i 

i 
1 

'2 
1 
1 


45,198 
82,751 

25,148 

48,718 

574,945 

210,829 

'39,669 
62,929 
89,063 
12.776 
78,528 
62,915 
107,934 
33,062 

'84,498 
26,911 
12,327 
28,631 
159,104 

'16,775 
64,494 
47,760 
34,846 
16,778 
142,258 
62,447 
25,900 


4,806 

39.605 

5,536 

'3"8',899 
42,955 
94,379 
49,095 
16,746 
95,234 
73,870 
27,551 
23,019 
76,043 
97,068 
11,390 

64,388 
18,909 

'22,246 

117,416 

27,061 

6,635 

25,984 

27,838 

10,473 

15,122 

112,232 

28,105 

46,442 


49,004 

122,366 

5,536 

25,148 

87,617 
617,900 
305,208 

49,095 

55,725 
158,163 
162,947 

40,327 
101,547 
138,958 
205,002 

44,452 

138,886 

48,820 

^ 12,327 

50,871 

266,520 
27,661 
23,310 
90,478 
75,598 
45,319 
31,900 

254,490 
90,552 
72,342 


81,607 

239,736 

46,636 

52,556 


Chiapas 

Fea. District 

Guanajuato 

Guerrero 


461,226 
102,863 
676,443 
545,183 
690,796 




831,347 


Michoacan 

Morelos 

Nuevo Leon 


828,933 
139,261 
263,603 
901,440 


Puebla 


896, .598 


Queretaro 

Quint. Roo 

S. Luis Potosi. . . 


200,211 

9,109 

648,914 

216,663 


Tabasco 

Tamaulipas 


175,247 
198,770 
942,335 


Tlaxcala 

Campeche 

Chihuahua 

Durango 


157,110 
63,351 
315,229 
407,577 
268,323 


Tepic 


139,273 


Vera Cruz 

Yucatan 

Zacatecas 


878,369 
249,061 
406,214 


Totals 


207 


46 


23 


2,171,386 


1,234,089 


3,406,475 


11,803.820 



The formation of Mexican cities and the conse- 
quent distribution of urban population are due to 
the natural causes affecting rural population, and 
also to certain artificial factors. Of the latter, the 

78 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

insecurity of life during the early days and again 
at the present time have caused the people to 
gather together for mutual protection, a factor to 
which the genesis of the village life of the farmers 
is also partially traceable. The building of the 
railways, industrial development and mining are 
the other artificial conditions which have caused 
the accumulation of population in towns. 

As a whole, the general agricultural nature of the 
Mexican population has kept the number of cities 
down to far below the usual proportion. Con- 
sidering the number of people in Mexico as about 
one-sixth those of the United States, it might be 
expected that Mexico would have one-sixth as 
many good-sized cities. In 1910 she had, however, 
only sixty-nine cities of over 10,000, while the 
United States had 601, a ratio of one to nine. In 
the same year the United States had fifty cities of 
over 100,000, while Mexico had only two, the cap- 
ital and Guadalajara; the United States had eight 
of over 500,000, and Mexico had none. The im- 
portant cities of Mexico also evidence few of the 
signs of bustle which characterize similar American 
towns. This is emphasized by a comparison of 
Mexican and American cities of the same popula- 
tion. For instance, Mexico City, although it 
ranks in population with Buffalo, Los Angeles, and 
San Francisco, impresses the visitor as being far 
smaller and much less progressive. There are not 
half a dozen fine buildings that are not public 
edifices, for there is so little co-operative industry 
and business that the population does not require 

6 79 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the office buildings, lofts, and working places that 
an American city of similar size finds indispensable. 

Guadalajara, the second city in Mexico, parallels 
in size the city of San Antonio; Puebla is about the 
size of Yonkers; Monterrey is like Akron, San Luis 
Potosi is as large as El Paso; Merida has as many 
people as Savannah; Leon compares with Chat- 
tanooga; Vera Cruz with Charleston, South 
Carolina; Aguas Calientes with Topeka; Morelia 
with Lincoln, Nebraska. Yet not one of these 
Mexican cities would impress the American visitor 
as having even half the size or importance of its 
American counterpart; in fact, the importance and 
beauty of Mexican cities depend but little upon 
their size or upon the amount of business done. 

In distribution, the chief cities of Mexico are 
grouped almost together in the south central 
plateau part, with Mexico City in the middle of the 
group. One comparison would take an egg-shaped 
area whose larger end is at Guadalajara and San 
Luis Potosi, and whose longer axis extends south- 
eastward from between those cities to Oaxaca. 
Such a grouping will have Mexico City at prac- 
tically the center of the egg and will include more 
than two-thirds of the cities and nearly two-thirds 
of the population. Most of the other cities of im- 
portance are located along arms radiating from the 
center, out the railways northward to Chihuahua, 
northeast to Monterrey and Tampico, and south- 
east to Vera Cruz. The reasons for this centering 
of the cities and population are altitude, water 
supply, temperature, and fertility of the soil. In 

80 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

practically the entire egg-shaped area two or even 
three crops can be harvested each year, and in 
most of it there is either rain at the right time or 
faciUties for irrigation. Most of the cities in the 
north have their reason for being in the mining 
industry, or, owing to their location, are on the 
ancient trade routes now covered by the railways. 
The cities of Mexico can also be divided into a 
number of isolated groups, more or less connected 
in their economic or physical interdependence. 
These isolated groups stand out clearly on the 
Mexican map. They indicate an essentially pro- 
vincial distribution, almost as significant and indeed 
depending on much the same causes as the distribu- 
tion of rural population, with the added determi- 
nants of the railways and mines. Natural means of 
connnunication have, however, had little part in 
the location of Mexican cities, There are no good 
natural harbors on the Gulf coast and few on the 
Pacific, and, owing to difficulties of approach, 
those that are available were largely neglected in 
the upbuilding of Mexico. There are also few 
navigable rivers, and such as there are are sur- 
prisingly neglected. Save for Tampico, at the 
mouth of the Panuco, and San Juan Bautista 
(Villa Hermosa) on the Grijalva in Tabasco, no 
important Mexican cities are located on navigable 
streams, and one is continually surprised to find 
practically none of the ancient ruins of pre-Hispanic 
Mexico on the shores of rivers. The Maya ruins 
are all well inland, approachable only through heavy 
jungles, and the imposing remains of Palenque are 

81 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

located, not near the Usumacinta River, one of the 
most majestic streams of North America, but a 
good day's ride from the nearest landing place. 

Apparently we must look to the new factors of 
railways and industrial growth to account for 
general population as well as rural and urban dis- 
tribution. But these are not necessarily even the 
chief causes, for throughout Mexican history there 
have been definite cmTents of population, and in 
similar directions to those of the Diaz period. The 
radiating center has been for centuries the Valley 
of Mexico in the great central plateau. Here was 
the metropolis of Aztec and pre-Aztec civilizations, 
and here was raised the colonial empire of New 
Spain; here again to-day is the most thickly inhab- 
ited portion of the republic. Aztec, Spanish, and 
Mexican populations have radiated from this 
center out into the wastes of the north in search of 
gold, and down into the tropics in search of food. 
Always the length of penetration of these radiating 
lines has been proportionate to the length and 
virihty of the empire which sent them forth. The 
Aztec flood had reached out and receded before the 
Spaniards. The colonial regime pushed northward 
to open the mining camps, and west, east, and south 
to open trading centers and new food supphes, only 
to scurry back to the cities on the highlands before 
the revolutionary hordes of Hidalgo and his suc- 
cessors. The ebb and tide of revolutions, empires, 
and republics have caused a corresponding ebb and 
tide of population from the central plateau and the 
safe cities, and back again to these centers in the 

82 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

face of succeeding uprisings. The Porfirian civiliza- 
tion, however, did give new outposts against the 
forces of disintegration, so that less and less has the 
population tended to rush back to the City of 
Mexico and its immediate environs. Monterrey, 
Guadalajara, Tampico, and Vera Cruz, once only 
outposts, have been, through the terrors of the 
last decade, centers of safety, usually as secure as 
the capital itself. 

This development of the country by the elements 
within it the Mexicans call '^ auto-colonization." 
Under the viceroys it was specifically encouraged. 
The colonial government planned definite expedi- 
tions into sections where Indian reports or rumors 
indicated that there were rich lands, mines, or 
mineral outcroppings to be developed. Native- 
born Creole adventurers, mestizos, and their Indian 
retainers, accompanied the armies and the priests 
on these expeditions, opening new territory and 
founding new cities. It was in this way almost 
alone that the present states of San Luis Potosi, 
Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Jalisco were originally 
populated, and this is also true in part of Tamau- 
lipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, 
Durango, Sinaloa, and Lower California. This 
process of auto-colonization, so deliberately studied, 
was interrupted during the revolutionary period 
from 1823 until the late 'seventies. 

Under Diaz this conscious pioneering w^as re- 
sumed, and the modern industrial development 
harnessed itself to long custom, to the forces which 
have always determined Mexico's slow advance and 

83 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

struggled against the depressing factors of climate, 
revolution, and racial destructiveness. The plans 
under which the railwa^^s of Mexico were built 
were almost identical with the fan-shaped develop- 
ment of auto-colonization which took place under 
the viceroys. Northeast, north, west, south, and 
east again, the railways branched out from Mexico 
City. Lines were built for the development of 
new territory in much the same way as the railways 
of the western United States were built, always 
looking forward to an ultimate increase in the value 
of the railway properties as the importance and 
richness of these new sections developed. The 
Diaz railway concessions have often been criticized 
as tending more to feed Mexico and her riches into 
the United States than to centralize the Mexican 
nation, but an understanding of the Spanish auto- 
colonization system, and of Diaz's realization that 
the development of Mexico inevitably followed 
those fanlike branches from the central cradle of 
Mexican civilization, explains simply this national 
railway plan. 

The auto-colonization of Mexico is one of the 
great pages of her history, including in its pano- 
rama such diverse scenes as the founding of the 
missions of the American Southwest, the opening 
of virtually all of Mexico's storied bonanza mines, 
and the building of the railways by American en- 
gineers encouraged by Diaz and the Mexicans of 
the Diaz epoch. It goes back to the beginnings of 
modern Mexican history, but not least of its im- 
portance is the fact that it was by following this 

84 



MEXICO'S POPULATION 

ancient Mexican custom and by developing the 
outlying districts and bringing the inhabitants 
into contact with the culture of the center that 
the Mexican national ideal was crystallized under 
Diaz. 



VITALITY 

THE three factors from which we can reach an 
understanding of vitahty in a population are 
birth and death rate, infant mortahty, and average 
longevity. Such Mexican statistics as exist can 
be set forth briefly, always understanding that all 
figures from Mexican sources are excessively inac- 
curate and must be taken as indices and not as 
final — all that we may be sure of is that they err 
on the side most favorable to the appearance of 
modern progress. 

Mexico belongs in the lowest of vitality classes, 
for her birth rate and her death rate are alike 
enormous. In the decade 1901-10, her registered 
birth rate, as corrected by the census growth, was 
42.5 per 1,000 (the births actually registered were 
33.5 per 1,000) and the average death rate over the 
same period was 32.6 per 1,000, comparing with 
the rates of the United States (calculated from the 
net rate of population increase after deducting the 
foreign born), which were 29.7 births and 14.6 
deaths per 1,000 per year from 1901 to 1910. The 
Mexican birth rate was thus 1.52 times and the 
death rate 2.3 times those of the United States. 
The death rate of Mexico City, the worst in any 

$6 



VITALITY 

reports, was, for 1907, 56 per 1,000, although the 
average for twelve years was placed as low as 47 — 
rates exceeded only by Lucknow, India, (58.5) or 
Cairo (49.2). Comparison with other centers of 
population in the same period (1900-13) gives 
the following rates: London, 14.7 per 1,000; St. 
Louis, 16.3; Paris, 16.9; New York, 17.3; Balti- 
more, 19.4; Rio de Janeiro, 22.5; Moscow, 26.1; 
Johannesburg (with much the same climate as 
Mexico City), 29.5; Panama, 30.1; Bombay, 37; 
Vera Cruz, 41.2. 

Births in Mexico are not registered with accuracy, 
a condition due not only to lax enforcement of 
regulations, but also to the ancient difficulty 
between the Church and the government, for no 
effort is made to harmonize the records of the 
churches and the civil register. Moreover, the 
large proportion of illegitimate births makes regis- 
try touch the delicacy of the family, while the vast 
number of births without attendance by either doc- 
tor or licensed midwife increases the problem. In 
1910 the civil registry showed 435,386 births, the 
Church registry 294, 201, while the average calculated 
over the ten-year period by the census was 614,024.^ 

As to ratio of birth and death rates, we find that 
Baron von Humboldt, in 1803, estimated from the 
data available that the proportion of births to 
deaths between 1752 and 1802 was as 170 to 100, 
which, if we accept the figures of this great observer, 
shows this to have been one of the most prolific 

^ Of the births registered civilly in 1910, 251,252 were legitimate 
and 184,143 illegitimate; 226,107 were boys and 209,279 girls, 

87 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



periods of Mexican history, when, indeed, the losses 
of the early colonial period were undoubtedly 
being made up rapidly.^ 

The rates per thousand between 1901 and 1910 
would indicate a ratio of but 127 births to 100 
deaths, however, as the normal condition of the 
population under the peace of Diaz. We must 
remember that Humboldt had only one census, 
that of 1793, to work with, and his calculations 
were based mostly upon parish registers, the in- 
crease of the Church's tithes, and the estimates of 
provincial officials in isolated localities. It seems 
fair to assume, therefore, that the ratios shown by 
the Diaz figures are more accurate, and that, as 
noted above, they err, if at all, on the side most 
creditable to Mexico, in this case, in showing a 
greater preponderance of births. 

A comparison of Mexico with other countries 
will illumine this point : 

RATES PER THOUSAND INHABITANTS ^ 



Country 



Mexico 

United States 

Spain 

France 

Holland 

England and Wales. 

Ireland 

Italy 

Norway 

Russia 



Births 


Mar- 


Deaths 


Natural 




riages 




Increase 


42.5 


4.4 


32.6 


9.9 


29.7 


10.5 


14.2 


15.5 


35.59 


8.74 


26.07 


9.52 


21.64 


7.55 


19.49 


2.15 


31.80 


7.59 


16.26 


15.54 


28.50 


7.93 


16.23 


12.27 


22.98 


5.18 


17.53 


5.45 


33.29 


7.23 


22.15 


11.14 


29.13 


6.42 


13.91 


15.22 


49.05 


9.25 


31.02 


18.03 



Infantile 
Mortality 



241 
124 
180 
135 
130 
133 
100 
175 
75 
240 



^ It was upon these figures that Humboldt estimated that Mex- 
ico was doubling her population every thirty-six to forty years. 

2 Mexican figures for 1910 from theBoleiin de Estadistica; United 
States from Bureau of the Census; others from Almanack de Gotha, 



VITALITY 

In infant mortality, Mexico, as shown in this 
table, surpasses all other civilized communities in the 
world. Of all the deaths in 1910, a total of 467,965, 
those of infants under 1 year numbered 143,297, 
or 30 per cent of the total, while more than half the 
entire number of deaths (239,970) were of children 
under 7 years. The corresponding figures for the 
United States show that the deaths of children 
under 1 year are 17 per cent, and of children under 
5 years 25 per cent, of the total deaths, while we 
have to count all to the age of 42 to account for 
half the deaths in the United States. Infantile 
mortality is calculated on the ratio of deaths under 
1 year per 1,000 births. The average of deaths 
under 1 year of age for 1901-10 in Mexico was 
148,177, and the average of births per year (based 
on the census interval 1901-10 and not on regis- 
tration) is 614,024, which gives the infantile 
mortality rate of Mexico at 241, which is nearly 
twice that of the registration area of the United 
States, which in 1910 w^as 124.^ 

This heavy infantile mortality is usually con- 
sidered the most outstanding feature of Mexican 
vital statistics, the basis of her immense death rate, 
and the clearest index of her sanitary and social 
conditions in general. Significant it is, and ap- 
palling it is, but the actuality is yet more so, for 
the loss of infant life may be discounted because the 
social cost of child creation and support for a few 

1 All Mexican figures are from the Boletin de la Direccion Gen- 
eral de Estadistica for the 1910 census, and unless otherwise stated 
those for the United States and other countries are from the Mor- 
tality Statistics of the Bureau of the Census, 1911. 

89 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

months is infinitesimal in Mexico. More appalling, 
if we accept the Mexican data, is that half of all 
who are born in Mexico die before they are 7 
years old, and three quarters before they are 40, 
while half of all who are born in the United States 
live to be 42. It is^ the loss each year of the thou- 
sands who have passed through early infancy and 
into promising childhood and youth and early 
maturity that constitutes the greatest loss from the 
death rates of Mexico, that make, indeed, the in- 
vestment in childhood a matter of apparently such 
questionable wisdom — "they die like flies in any 
case!" 

More than this, half of the Mexicans living to- 
day are under 20 years of age, while half of the in- 
habitants of the United States are over 30, the 
years of greatest production and greatest addition 
to the growth of civilization. Only one third of 
the Mexicans are living after 30 and less than one- 
fifth attain the maturity of 40 years. 

The Mexican statistics available make the com- 
putation of average longevity inaccurate, but from 
the death rate it may be taken at about 15 years, 
which compares with the average life of residents of 
New York City, about 23 years, and of the United 
States, about 35 years. 

The following table illustrates the difference in 
the population of Mexico and the United States at 
various ages, itself an astonishing commentary on 
birth-rate, infantile mortality, and the populations 
at the truly productive ages of human life. The 
Mexican figures are for 1910, those for the United 

90 



VITALITY 



MEXICAN AND TYPICAL UNITED STATES POPULATIONS BY AGES * 





Mexicans 


United States 


Age Interval 


Living at Ages Named 

in 1910 

Total, 15,160,369 


From U. S. Life Table 

for Population of 

15,445,608 


1-10 days 


13,263 
13,540 
33,369 

60,172 
205,049 
512,417 

777,638 

467,943 

467,977 

461,849 

457,761 

2,147,633 

1,594,729 

1,569,639 

1,339,252 

1,485,927 

817,105 

1,089,418 

518,771 

689,135 

284,350 

461,909 

167,446 

172,993 

59,035 

69,364 

17,696 

15,411 

4,229 

3,861 

917 

18,317 

15,160,369 




11-20 days 




21 days-1 month .... 




0-1 month 


24,180 
116,586 
134,793 

275,559 

261,285 

256,587 

254,049 

252,348 

1,246,191 

1,229,907 

1,212,999 

1,186,263 

1,154,049 

1,117,359 

1,074,183 

1,025,242 

968,451 

901,521 

817,065 

709,428 

676,090 

429,686 

277,935 

143,799 

55,032 

14,436 

2,322 

222 


2-6 months 

6 mos.-l yr 

Years 

0-1 

1-2 

2-3 

3-4 

4-5 

5-10 

10-15 

15-20 


20-25 

25-30 

30-35 

35-40 

40-45 

45-50 

50-55 

55-60 

60-65 

65-70 

70-75 

75-80 

80-85 

85-90 

90-95 

95-100 

Over 100 


Unknown 










15,445,608 



^ The Mexican figures are taken from the Boletin de la Dir. Gral. 
de Estadistica, Censo de 1910. The United States figures for a 
similar population were obtained by multiplying by three the 
"Lx" column of the "Life Tables for Both Sexes in the Original 
Registration States, 1910," which covered a typical population 
of 5,148,536. United States Life Tables, Washington, 1916, 

91 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

States an adaptation of the 1910 United States Life 
Tables for a similar population, including both 
whites (native and foreign born) and negroes. 

There are certain elements of error in the Mexican 
side of this table^ due chiefly to the overwhelming 
tendency to group the figures about conventional 
divisions, such as ''6 months" and the years ending 
in and 5. This is always the case in censuses of 
ignorant people, and the tendency of Mexicans to 
observe their annual saints' days instead of their 
birthdays adds to this confusion. Only by this 
theory can we account, for instance, for the figures 
which would indicate that there are more than 
twice as many children listed as between 6 and 12 
months of age as under 6 months — an obvious 
absurdity. 

These comparisons indicate, however, that the 
heavy birth rate of Mexico is not entirely wiped 
out by the mortality of the early years, for the 
children who complete their first year are almost 
three times as many as in the corresponding typical 
American community, and up to 10 years, even, 
apparently number about twice the American child 
population. Balancing the Mexican figures roughly, 
we can take it that after the early mortality of the 
first seven years (when, despite half the deaths 
being at these tender ages, the heavy birth rate still 
keeps the Mexican age groups greater than simi- 
lar American groups) youth maintains the Mexican 
lead until about the age of 20, when the number 
of Mexicans at each age falls with astonishing 

rapidity. This is borne out by the mortality 

92 



VITALITY 

statistics by ages, which show that after the years 
previous to the age of 7, the heaviest death rate in 
Mexico is between 20 and 30. 

The mortahty figures available in the Mexican 
census reports make comparison with the United 
States census tables, and indeed even with the 
Mexican population statistics themselves, almost 
impossible. The following table had to be made by 
the aid of crude estimates at important points 
which, combined with the inaccuracy of Mexican 
statistics in general, greatly reduces its value. 

Where estimates were necessary, however, the 
graph system was used, making them correspond 
as nearly as possible to the statistics available. 
In view of the additional fact that these calculations 
were certainly not anticipated by the Mexican 
census statisticians, and so were not provided 
against, they reveal figures which probably have no 
greater errors than those made intentionally and 
unintentionally by the Mexicans themselves in the 
tables of other sorts that are available. 

The information conveyed by this table is, with 
all its possible inaccuracies, thoroughly significant. 
The fact that the Mexican death rate is overwhelm- 
ing in every age group indicates a condition of 
health and Uvuig conditions that is appalling, even 
though it does bear out (and emphasize) all that 
has been suggested in theory and observation by 
physicians and students. Compared with the 
United States our figures show the following ratios : 
The Mexican infant mortality rate is 1.93 times 
that of the United States; death rate between 0-5 

93 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

years, 2.77 times the United States rate; 5-10 
years, 3.24 times; 10-15 years, 3.57 times; 15-20 
years, 3.36 times; 20-30 years, 2.88 times; 30- 
45 years, 3.20 times; 45-65 years, about 2.75 times; 
over 60, about 1.51 times the similar United States 
death rate. The infantile mortality of Mexico is. 



DEATHS STATISTICS AND EATES BY AGES 



Age 
Intervals 


Mexicans 

Dying in 

Age Group 


Corres- 
ponding 
Deaths, 
Pennsyl- 
vania 2 


Mexico 
Deaths 

per 
10003 


Penn- 
sylvania 

Deaths 
per 1000 


U.S. 
Deaths 
per 1000 


Spain 
Deaths 
per 1000 


England 
Deaths 
per 1000 


All Ages. . 
Years 

0-1.... 
0-5.... 
1-7 


467,965 

143,297 
213,000 1 
93,673 
23,000 1 
21,550 
12,000 1 
18,980 


222,292 

48,390 
67,576 


32.6 

241.0^ 
91.2 


14.2 

124.80* 
37.3 


14.2 

124.0^ 
32.9 


26.5 

180.0* 
104.1 


17.2 

129.0* 
53.5 


5-10. . . 
7-14 


5,260 


10.7 


3.3 


3.1 


8.6 


4.1 


10-15... 
15-20... 
20-25... 


3,106 

5,258 
8,048 

' "l6,672 

' "l8,482' 
30,824 
67,330 


7.5 
12.1 

" 14.4 

' 19.9' 

' '35.2 
97.7 


2.1 
3.6 
5.2 

' '6.'2 ' 

"8.8 ' 


2.2 
3.6 
5.2 
5.0 
6.4 
6.2 
8.9 


4.3 
7.1 
9.4 


2.3 
3.3 
4.3 


20-30 


. 40,847 




25-35. . 


9.2 


5.9 


30-45 


48,235 




35-45.. . 


11.1 


9.9 


45-60 


50,495 
49,956 




Over 60 





















1 Estimated. The Mexican statistics for deaths below age 
20 are in groups of 7 years; above 20, in groups of 5, 10, and 15 
years. The population by ages, on the other hand, is in groups 
of 5 throughout. 

2 Double the deaths of Pennsylvania are used, as this state's 
population (7,665,111 in 1910) is approximately half that of all 
Mexico. The deaths used are for 1911. 

3 Mexican death rates are calculated from population reports 
set dovra in the preceding table. 

* This is the infantile mortaUty rate, the ratio of deaths under 
1 year to births (not to the population). Spanish mortaUty rates 
irom Movimiento de la Poblacion de Espana, Madrid, 1906: English 
from Annuaire Internationale de Statistique, The Hague, 1917. 

94 



VITALITY 

apparently, less in proportion than Mexico's losses 
in the higher age groups, a condition less sig- 
nificant in its relation to infantile mortality itself 
(the rate is vast enough in any case) than in its 
indication of the health conditions in youth and 
maturity, as was pointed out above. The most 
healthful age in Mexico appears to be, as in other 
countries, between 10 and 15 years, but this group 
has, by Mexican data, the largest multiple of the 
United States rate in the entire scale; in other 
words, more Mexican children, in proportion to 
normal, die at their healthiest age than die in the 
perilous days of early infancy. 

The figures are an index, above all else, of a state 
of almost contmuous ill health on the part of a 
large majority of the Mexican people. Perhaps the 
truest indication that this is the case is this dis- 
proportionate number of deaths at the most active 
age (10-15 years), but there is also the evidence, at 
first confusing, of the endurance of Mexicans, and 
particularly of Indians, under the most enervating 
hving conditions, poor food, alcohol, sexual over- 
indulgence and hard labor apparently having but 
little effect on thousands of the population. The 
vigor of many Mexicans, in the face of the conditions 
under which they live, has long been remarked. 
The famous runners of Aztec days, who in relays 
carried fish caught in the late afternoon at Vera 
Cruz over 300 miles and up 7,500 feet into the moun- 
tains, to Montezuma's noontime breakfast table in 
Mexico City, seem like creatures of legend. Yet 

to-day such runners still cover long routes with mail 
7 95 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

and with heavy loads as well, in interior Mexico, 
and one^ need not leave the cities to see a single 
cargador carrying a 650-pound piano on his back. 
In the mines Indians carry loads of 200 to 300 
pounds up ladders of 2,000 rungs, and pack great 
loads over the trails at an endless, unvarying dog- 
trot hour after hour. The Mexican soldier — and. 
the soldadera, or woman commissariat who marches 
with him — can cover fifty miles a day, if necessary, 
and the average day's march of Mexican infantry 
is said to be twenty-four miles, a good day's journey 
for cavalry. 

Indications of great vigor as these are, their very 
presence forces us, even without the death rates, 
to a realization that there must be tremendous 
factors of ill health working on the sections of the 
population which do not demonstrate such vigor. 
If we accept the estimate that to an ordinary life 
there are 6,000 days of slight illness and 300 days 
of severe illness^ and realize that in Mexico these 
days of illness are crowded into fifteen years, instead 
of the thirty-five years of the average American's 
life, something of the prevalence of sickness in 
Mexico becomes evident. To be sure, only about 
a quarter of the deaths in Mexico are listed as 
'^ classified by doctor," which indicates that the 
rest are without medical attendance and therefore 
that disease in Mexico probably is fatal after fewer 
days of sickness than elsewhere. But even giving 
a liberal discount on this account, we may safely 

^ Cf . Ellsworth Huntington, "The Relation of Health to Racial 
Oapacity— The Example of Mexico," Geographical Review, 1920. 

96 



VITALITY 

assume that there is at least 50 per cent more sick- 
ness in Mexico than in other countries. In other 
words, there are at least half as many days again 
in which a Mexican has attacks of indigestion, colds, 
or fevers, than the American or Englishman. That 
this is literally true, anyone who has lived long in 
Mexico and dealt much with Mexicans will agree. 

Thus ill health becomes one of the great elements 
working on the Mexican vitality, whether we regard 
the hard, abusive work, alcohol, bad food, etc., as 
contributants to this ill health or additional de- 
pressants. The fact must be recognized that all of 
these are destined to remain until relieved by im- 
proved social and educational conditions, condi- 
tions which, although now truly affected by the 
resulting apathy, in the long run must be con- 
sidered as affecting rather than affected by the 
elements which make for national vigor. 

In studying the causes for Mexico's high birth 
rate, we trace them quickly back to race and cli- 
mate. The customs which cause early marriages 
and which eliminate practically all birth control, 
as well as the fecundity of the women, are perhaps 
all, in the last analysis, racial and climatic. The 
Indian is a breeder probably second only to the 
African negro, and in the mixture of white and red 
which make up the bulk of Mexico's population 
this fecundity has apparently not been lost. Mex- 
ican families are almost invariably large, and save 
for the heavy death rate the country would have 
been populated and overflowed by the early Indians 

long before the Spaniards came. With the fe- 

97 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cundity still persisting, as it apparently does, only 
the fact ""that the Spanish civilization did abnost 
nothing to reduce the Indian's natural enemies, 
disease, war, and famine, has kept the Indian popu- 
lation within bounds. Such improved sanitation 
as there has been in Mexico has acted upon the 
mestizo almost alone, and has touched the Indian 
but little; so that the growth of the mestizo popu- 
lation stands for all the improvement in Mexican 
living conditions that there has been from Spanish 
times to those of Diaz. 

Although the fecundity of the Indian seems to 
persist into the mixed breed, there is a noticeable 
falling off in the size of the families as we ascend 
the social scale. The records of births among the 
Indians and peons, however, show a continuation 
of the immense birth rate. Prof. Frederick Starr ^ 
records the figures which he gathered from the sub- 
jects of his ethnological measurements. Twenty- 
one Tarascan women had had 152 children, of whom 
101 had died, the largest family in the group being 
13. Nineteen Tlaxcalan mothers had borne 116 
children, of whom half had died, the largest family 
being 18. Twenty-four Aztec mothers had had 
140 children, of whom 60 survived. Twenty-two 
Mixtec women had had 122 children, of whom 77 
were still living. Only one of the group was 
barren. The record continues through many pages 
of his book, families of 18 and 20 being common, 
but almost invariably from half to three quarters 



1 Physical Characteristics of the Indians of Southern Mexico, 
p. 18 ei seq. 

98 



VITALITY 

died in infancy. On the father's side there are 
often startHng figures, a Protestant missionary 
reporting a father of 31 children, 15 by one wife 
and 16 by another, as being not unusual. 

One of the chief contributions to the numbers in 
Mexican families is the custom of early marriage, 
as about one half of the Mexican women marry or 
bear their first child at the age of sixteen. The 
marriage statistics for 1910 show that out of 58,000 
marriages 35,000 of the women were under twenty, 
and 18,000 between twenty and thirty, while, 
interestingly enough, about 15,000 of the men were 
under twenty, and 32,000 between twenty and 
thirty. 

In observing the heavy death rate of Mexico we 
find the great infantile mortality apparently due to 
a number of interrelated causes, the first of which 
is the birth rate, which, by its very preponderance, 
lessens the care which is given the infants in their 
tender years and complicates the problem of sup- 
port, so that the entire family is undernourished, 
with resultant heavy deaths among the younger 
members. Early marriages, the heavy strain upon 
the women of continuous motherhood, and sexual 
overindulgence all have a bearing on the low vitality 
of the resultant children. 

Custom takes its toll in yet other ways, such as 
intemperance in food and alcohol and in methods 
of infant feeding, children being taken from the 
mother's breast to be fed with tortillas, bananas, and 
hot peppers. Superstition and ignorance combine 
to prescribe loathsome and inefficient cures for tem- 

99 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

porary ailments, cause the abuse of patent medi- 
cines and nostrums, and continuous violation of all 
the laws of hygiene. Crowded tenements, lack of 
any fresh air at night, uncleanliness, and all of the 
unhappy phases of the living conditions of the low- 
class Mexican have their part in both infantile 
mortality and the general high death rates. The 
climate makes the natives subject to bronchial and 
pulmonary diseases, furnishes a kindly breeding 
zone for vermin, animal and insect, with resultant 
typhus and malaria, while smallpox and digestive 
diseases are encouraged by both climate and un- 
cleanliness. The climate, moreover, is deleterious 
in its effect on the food crops, uncertain rains, 
noxious weeds, and a none too fertile soil combining 
again and again to devastate the land with famine. 

War has been no less a factor in its effect on the 
death rate in Mexico than elsewhere. The non- 
combatant element of the population has always 
suffered from war, and such inaccurate figures as 
we have of the period previous to the rule of Diaz, 
and since, suggest that the toll which has been 
collected time and again by Mexico's interracial 
struggles probably transcends anything else in her 
history. Just how great this toll was we shall 
probably never know, as statistics were not taken 
during the troublous times in the middle of the last 
century, and the Carranza government studiously 
concealed all facts regarding military losses, epi- 
demics, and deaths by famine within Mexico during 
the decade just closed. 

The lack of scientific hygiene, both municipal and 

100 



VITALITY 

personal, in Mexico has had effects on the death 
rate which can only be remarked— figures are abso- 
lutely unavailable. The Spanish records reported 
tremendous plagues, the most important of which 
were those of smallpox, typhus, and measles. When 
smallpox brought by a negro slave first appeared in 
Mexico almost immediately after the conquest, the 
Spanish historians glibly record that "half of the 
Indian population succumbed." Later epidemics, 
like that of 1544, took 800,000; that of 1576, 
2,000,000 in the central plateau alone; and so on 
down the years, with decreasing toll, due perhaps 
as much to the increasing accuracy of statistics as 
to the lessening of the plague, for we can give but 
little credence to the very crude estimates of these 
early epidemics. 

Typhus, which, if identical with the traditional 
Indian plague, matlahahuatl, wiped out millions of 
Indians at various times before the conquest, has 
appeared from time to time throughout history 
since. The so-called ''filth diseases" are generally 
considered endemic in Mexico, but the statistics 
gathered under Diaz indicate that, although they 
often appeared, the ravages were comparatively 
shght, although the epidemic of typhus which raged 
in Mexico City in 1914, under Carranza, was re- 
ported by newspaper correspondents to have carried 
off well on to 50,000 people. 

Probably the most serious phases of the problem 
of disease in Mexico are the carelessness and ig- 
norance in treatment and the lack of sanitation 
and pure water supply. The conception of disease 

101 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

as a visitation from Heaven, and that there is 
nothing t6 do for it but to manifest patience and 
resignation, is deep-rooted in the Mexican philos- 
ophy, extending from the lower classes to the 
highest ranks of society. The directions of doctors 
are ignored, medicines are not taken, ventilation, 
sunlight, and baths are varied according to tradi- 
tion and not to the instructions of the physician 
even when a physician is called — which is astonish- 
ingly seldom. Of the 467,965 deaths in Mexico in 
1910, 139,008 were listed as ''classified by doctor" 
and 328,957 as ''unclassified," apparently indi- 
cating the lack of medical attendance in more than 
three quarters of the deaths. A sick Mexican is 
kept in utter darkness and, what is worse, almost 
without air, he is not bathed, and is stuffed with 
food; only in the treatment of smallpox, where the 
light causes the disfigurement of scars, and where 
baths are notoriously dangerous, are sunlight and 
water used freely. 

Quarantining is almost impossible, owing to the 
fatalism with which the lower classes regard disease, 
leaving weather as probably the chief saving factor 
in the history of Mexican epidemics. The changes 
between the hot, dry season and the cool, wet 
season are so great and so sudden that the typical 
diseases of each quickly succumb, so that typhus 
will rage in the Mexican capital almost unchecked 
until the rainy season suddenly and completely 
stops its ravages. 

The sanitary conditions of Mexico towns have 
never been adequate, and what improvement has 

102 



VITALITY 

been made has been more than counterbalanced by 
the crowding of the lower classes uito unsanitary 
dwelling places. Moreover, such municipal sani- 
tation as exists is but recent, and even in Mexico 
City the achievement of the notable drainage sys- 
tem which the capital now possesses was at great 
cost and after literal centuries of labor. ^ 

Impure and unclean food is almost the rule in 
Mexico. Such inspection as there is is made by 
officials without education and without any real 
conviction of the value or importance of the work 
which they do. The markets reek with flies, and 
adulterated and partially decayed food is sold 
with impunity. The almost complete lack of re- 
frigeration either in transportation or in storage 
has a salutary effect upon prices of foods, but, 
unfortunately, eliminates this factor in the preser- 
vation of the soundness of the products offered. 
The food animals are raised under the most dis- 
gusting conditions, the Mexican razor-back hog, 
which furnishes the chief pork supply, competing 
with the buzzard for the food which he gets. 
Trichina is almost invariably present in Mexico 
pork, and he who dares to eat underdone beef in 
Mexico runs imminent danger of tapeworm. 

The climate of Mexico is a most significant factor 
in the vigor of the people. The warm, humid air 
of the hot country has much the same effect on the 
resident as a continuous warm bath — that is, it is 
debilitating and sedative. In the temperate and 
cold regions the people are more active, and espe- 

^ See paxt ii, chapter ix, Cleanliness and Sanitation. 

103 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cially so in the northern sections where the climate 
more nearly approximates that of southern United 
States, but there seems no doubt that on the plateau 
the rarefied air, with its accompanying absence of 
oxygen, and the strain of the long, dry period upon 
the nervous system, have a definite effect upon the 
inhabitants, tending to nervousness in the Creoles 
and in foreign whites, and probably resulting in the 
early death of the nervous types of the lower classes, 
leaving the lethargic alone as the typical Mexican 
of the plateau as well as of the hot country. 

It is noticeable that when the natives of one 
section are transferred to another they often suc- 
cumb by debility or even by early death to the 
local conditions; the newcomer from the high 
lands is very likely to break out into sores and to 
find himself unable to do a full stint of physical 
work in the hot country, while, on the other hand, 
the hot-country Indian or mestizo transferred to 
higher altitudes often falls a victim to the ravages 
of alcoholism and tuberculosis. 

It is generally conceded that as a nation the Mexi- 
cans are undernourished. This is due to several 
causes; first, poverty; second, the apathy which 
keeps the provider for the family from working 
more than is necessary for his own personal com- 
fort, with the resultant undernourishment of his 
large family; and third, the nature of the food 
consumed.^ The overindulgence in stimulants 
ranges from the excessive use of hot peppers for 
seasoning to a craving for noxious drugs. The ex- 

^ See part ii, chap, vii, Mexican Food. 
104 



VITALITY 

cessive use of coffee, the drinking of pulque, which 
is not only an intoxicant, but an autointoxicant 
(Mexican doctors hold that it sets up a fermenta- 
tion in the digestive tract and brings on a stupid 
languor comparable to narcotic poisons), and the 
almost continuous use of tobacco, mark the scale 
up to the use by thousands of the lower-class 
Mexicans of the herb marihuana, a native variant 
of the hasheesh. The use of alcohol is all but uni- 
versal among Mexicans. Chmatic causes combine 
to make the immediate effect of use of hquor per- 
haps more pernicious than in lands in the temperate 
zone, and the fact that the Mexican of the lowest 
classes is likely to start his day with a capita (little 
drink) of native rum or alcohol, that he washes 
down his meals with pulque, or beer when he can 
afford it, the habit of taking a number of drinks 
before dinner, and after, make the effect of alcohol 
one of the most serious problems of Mexican 
vitality. 

In sapping the strength of the Mexican people, 
probably no single factor is greater than venereal 
disease. Prevalent from one end of the country to 
the other, it is said that 90 per cent of Mexican men 
are affected. Recognized by the social organization 
as one of the inevitable facts of life, these diseases 
lower the vitality and sap the strength and mark 
the new generations with blindness and inherited 
weaknesses. Syphilis was probably introduced by 
the Spaniards, there being no confusion on this 
point in Mexico except the efforts made by some 
chroniclers of the colonial regime to confuse local 

105 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

forms of lepJrosy with this Oriental plague. In 
Mexico, however, the disease apparently does not 
assume the virulent form noted elsewhere, and is 
said to respond promptly to careful treatment. In 
this, as in other diseases of uncleanliness, the. 
apathy and ignorance of the people are the most 
serious factors. 

On the subject of defectives and mental incompe- 
tents statistics in Mexico are almost completely 
lacking. A study of 26,000 students in the elemen- 
tary schools of the Federal District made in May, 
1913, recorded that 1,063, or 4 per cent, showed 
mental incapacity, 39 (only a trace in percentage) 
were listed as morons with retarded intellectual 
development, 108, or .04 per cent, were of "bad 
character"; which divisions, combined with others 
not specified, brought the number of children de- 
clared to be "really abnormal" up to 2,229 or 8.3 
per cent of the total of 26,981. The number of deaf 
mutes in the republic in one year for which reports 
were made by the governors, 1897, showed 6,235, 
the population of the country at that time being 
about 13,000,000.1 

The prevalence of goiter in Indian Mexico was 
remarked on and recorded in his reports by Prof. 



^ The following is the official, but probably inadequate, census 
of defectives in 1910: 

M. F. Total 

Blind 7,116 4,746 11,862 

Deaf mutes 4,644 3,130 7,774 

Idiots 2,768 1,400 4,168 

Cretins 1,829 801 2,630 

Mental debility 2,840 1,971 4,811 

Totals 19,197 12,048 31,245 

106 



VITALITY 

Frederick Starr, previously quoted. In some places 
he found that astonishingly large numbers of the 
inhabitants were affected and confirmed the report 
that forty years before it had been even more 
common, by the surprising number of deaf mutes 
among the children. In one village he found that 
perhaps half of the people had goiter, sometimes in 
the most astonishing degree and yet without seri- 
ously affecting their work; deaf mutes were very 
often present in these goitrous famihes. There is 
undoubtedly a great deal more goiter and deaf- 
mutism than any records show, as it is found 
natm-ally in restricted communities where inter- 
marriage has been going on for centuries. 

The figures upon* insanity have never been reli- 
able, and even those which have been taken have 
not been published in digested form. In using 
Mexican statistics, one has always to remember that 
the material has been furnished by the local author- 
ities, and that the principle of putting the best foot 
forward, which was one of the basic tenets of the 
Diaz regime, was followed with extreme literalness 
by practically all officials in the repubhc. 

In general, however, it is safe to assert that the 
physical and intellectual defectives are not in ex- 
traordinary proportions. Students of the Indians 
agree that such signs of degeneracy as appear in 
Mexico are in about the same proportion as those 
found among the American savages north of the 
Rio Grande. Racial conditions, including the com- 
paratively simple conditions of life and the natural 
checks on population, still combine to make the 

107 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

question of defectives a very small item in the study 
of the Mexican people. 

To sum up, the birth and death rates of Mexico 
indicate a primitive community of low vitality. 
The factors which directly affect them are racial 
tendencies, the climate and a prevalence of vices, 
undernourishment and apathy. Despite these de- 
pressing factors, the Indian still remains the 
strongest of the racial elements, surviving alike his 
own vices and living conditions and the diseases 
of the white man. The mestizo, almost in direct 
ratio with the increase of his white strain, is phys- 
ically weaker, and, despite his improved living con- 
ditions, as a race is actually less resistant to the 
Mexican climate than the Indian. The white, as 
always in tropical lands, with difi&culty holds his 
own. 

More obvious, then, than race persistence, but 
linked inexorably with it, is the factor of health 
and its effect on the Mexican character and Mexi- 
can achievement. No person who is continually 
sick can be happy or can achieve greatly. No 
nation with such an overwhelming death-rate and 
thus sick rate can be an agreeable or active mem- 
ber of the councils of nations. Mexican race can- 
not be changed; its slow developments move on 
with the inevitability of a glacier. But Mexican 
health can be improved, and in its improvement 
the white world will have much to say and much 
to accomplish. If, in years to come, through gov- 
ernment or private initiative, such work as was 
done by the American army doctors during the 

108 



VITALITY 

Vera Cruz occupation, or as is being done in South 
America and the Orient by such elements as the 
Rockefeller Institute, shall come to Mexico, the 
outside world will have done mightier things than 
diplomacy and economic pressure can dream of. 



VI 

CASTES AND CLASSES 

FROM colonial times Mexico's social organization 
has been characterized by distinct caste or class 
lines. Formerly these followed race divisions al- 
most identically, and to this day parallels of class 
and race go deep into the fabric of Mexican life. 
To understand the significance of race we must 
uncover these deep-grown associations; to under- 
stand the cohesive elements in Mexico's population 
we must understand their relations to race. 

When the Spaniards came, they brought this one 
definite and ineradicable class cleavage. The Span- 
iard was a white man, the Indian was a dark man, 
and the white man, whatever his social standing at 
home, whatever his occupation or rank, was the 
superior of any Indian. Effort was made by the 
king to preserve a recognition of the Indian aristoc- 
racy, but this lasted hardly a generation, and soon 
the race distinctions had stratified into the Spanish- 
American caste system. The colonial social struc- 
ture recognized four grand divisions, first: the 
peninsulares, or Spaniards born in Spain; second, 
the castes, including the native-bom whites and all 

110 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

the mixtures of Spaniards with Indians and ne- 
groes; third, the Indians; and, fourth, the negroes. 
These strata persisted even beyond the expulsion 
of the peninsular es, and it is upon them that the 
social fabric of Mexico is built to-day. 

The castes at the close of the sixteenth century, 
when they had taken definite form, were as follows: 

Children of Spanish men and Spanish women — Creoles 
. Children of Spaniard and Indian — mestizos 
Children of Spaniard and mestizo — -castizos 
Children of Spaniard and castizo — espanoles 
Children of Spaniard and negro — mulattos 
Children of Spaniard and mulatto — moriscos, or Moors 
Children of Indian and negro — zambos 

The castes and classes of the colonial period were, 
then, definitely racial. The Spanish whites de- 
spised the Indians and looked down on the Creoles 
and mestizos with degrees of superiority varied 
directly in proportion to their Indian blood. The 
Creoles considered the Spanish-born whites as their 
only equals. The mestizos were arrogant toward 
the Indians and servile to the whites. The Indians 
and negroes hated the whites and despised the 
mestizos. 

Not a pretty picture, this, but a fair presentation 
of the feelings which marked, and indeed had no 
small part in creating, the colonial caste divisions 
just noted, divisions which continued with little 
variation well into the period of independence. 
The attempt to eliminate the "color line" and to 
inject a semblance of democracy into Mexican 
social institutions was largely responsible for the 
8 111 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

change from "caste" to "class" divisions, a change 
without significance in the beginning, and with httle 
significance even now, when the Mexican census 
takers vary it only to call the obvious upper class 
"white," the middle class "mestizo" and the lowest 
classes "Indian." There are distinct reasons for 
these race parallels. In the beginning is the now 
accepted fact that the caste and class divisions of 
Mexico do not go back to the Aztecs. There was 
in pre-Hispanic Mexico no hereditary nobility and 
no distinct class divisions except of the most 
primitive sort, certainly nothing approximating 
the elaborate social system which appeared early 
in the Spanish regime, a fact borne out by the ap- 
parent absence of caste lines within the distinctively 
Indian groups to-day. 

The caste, and hence the present class, system of 
Mexico was brought in by the Spaniards, giving the 
dying feudal system of Europe a new lease of life 
in the New World. There were rapid shiftings of 
social position due to great wealth acquired in the 
mines and through royal grants of property and 
slaves, but to the end of the colonial regime no 
Creole could hold high ecclesiastical office or the 
higher positions in the colonial government, and 
perhaps most significant of all, the new heiresses of 
the white aristocracy almost never married Creoles ; 
"a husband and fine linen come only from Spain," 
as an old proverb had it. 

Below the pure whites, Spaniards and Creoles, 
came the lower castes. The divisions were origi- 
nally created by law, and at one time education was 

112 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

allowed the mestizos only when they were the recog- 
nized descendants of Spanish soldiers. 

Caste gripped Mexico in yet another way in the 
guilds which grew up under the viceroys. The 
most powerful were those of the clergy and the 
military, but physicians, miners, merchants, pot- 
ters, even, all had their guilds and each guild its 
fuero, or special court, in which all matters dealing 
with members had to be adjudicated. The clergy 
with its great patronage became the most powerful 
of all the guilds, and at least from the social view- 
point the important feature of the Reform under 
Juarez was rather the abolition of the fueros with 
their caste privileges than even the nationaliza- 
tion of Church property or the religious upheaval. 

The force of land ownership early came into the 
Mexican social scheme as a determinant of class 
regroupings. In Spanish times the number of land 
owners was very small and in their hands (and in 
the hands of the Church) was concentrated prac- 
tically all of the real property of the colony, while 
the remainder of the population was almost with- 
out possessions. This gave a solid support for the 
caste system, but the emphasis on property, com- 
bined with the very instability of wealth in a new 
country, was powerful in the change from caste to 
class divisions. 

The great haciendas helped to create a landed 
gentry upon which the upper class still depends, 
for through all Mexican history the haciendas have 
been the symbol of aristocracy. The middle class; 
probably had its origin in a desire for emulation of 

113 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the rich and powerful, for the middle class of Mexico 
had its beginnings not in the time of Diaz, but in 
the days of the viceroys. Wealth was the privilege 
of the whites, but position, and with it opportunity, 
could also be enjoyed by the lower Creoles and the 
mestizos. The desire for possessions and for place 
created, in the colonial era, the class of office- 
holders, or '^bureaucrats," as the Mexicans call 
them, who were the first bourgeois of Mexico, a 
type as characteristic as the bourgeois of France, 
and at first composed largely of mestizo sons of 
Spanish officials. The creation of small nests of 
capital, either by graft in office or by business, gave 
the means first for acquiring Indian communal 
lands under redistribution plans, or bits of ancient 
haciendas after disastrous revolutions. First ap- 
pearing in the early days, the increase in the number 
of ranches has gone on steadily, but the owners have 
not often been Indians, but rather the new ranchero 
class, usually mestizo, and usually definitely ambi- 
tious for social place and honor. In 1856 there were 
2,860 great haciendas, the property of aristocracy, 
and about the same number of ranches, while in 
1910 there were 8,872 haciendas, 26,607 ranches, 
and 2,479 small ranches, not counting the small 
Indian farms. We must, indeed, recognize the 
element of land ownership ^ as one of the great 
originating elements of the middle class of Mexico. 
The ranchero, who is described at great length 
and with much dramatic effect in Mexican histories, 

1 Land distribution is discussed more fully in part ii, chap x, 
Conditions of Labor. 

^ 114 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

forms an interesting group from which have sprung 
the bandits and many of the revolutionary leaders. 
As far back as 1906, in talking with men of this type 
in far-off Tabasco, the writer learned that it was 
chiefly the political aspect of their class which in- 
terested them — they considered themselves a '^new 
aristocracy," yet to come into its own. The peace 
of Diaz was to them, even at that time, an ephem- 
eral condition and predictions of the revolution 
and the chaos following the passing of the great 
dictator were freely indulged in. Essentially self- 
ish, but with a germ of true national consciousness, 
the attitude of these men was extremely significant 
as indicating the class bias which is now sowing 
and reaping the whirlwind of revolution. 

In the cities and towns the lower middle classes 
and the upper lower classes were formerly trades- 
men and small manufacturers, but the creation of 
a working middle class of Mexicans through indus- 
trial labor and organization belongs almost alone 
to the Diaz regime. The Mexicanization of the 
railways gave a tremendous impetus to the rise of 
artisans and lower executives, and in the later days 
of Diaz there was evolved, literally as the world 
looked on, a distinct class of Mexican machinists 
and trainmen, the conductors and brakemen being 
mostly mestizos, and the mechanics and enginemen 
largely Indians. In the training schools of the 
National Railways alone over 22,000 young Mexican 
peons were turned into skilled mechanics and engine- 
men, the nucleus of a producing middle class, in the 
course of some twenty years of American tutelage. 

115 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Thus it appears that, although race was the first 
determinant of class in Mexico, tradition, posses- 
sions, and industry have varied its effects. Never- 
theless, while the ''color line" has theoretically 
disappeared, class distinctions of to-day are still so 
sharpened by race as to be ahnost parallel to race 
groupings. The upper class is white, or nearly so, 
and includes practically all of the Mexicans of pure 
European lineage, but in it also are some of clear 
Indian stock, and it is doubtful whether the ma- 
jority of the upper classes was not of mixed blood 
under Diaz, as what passed for ''upper classes" 
certainly was under Carranza. On the other hand, 
although the lower classes are overwhelmingly 
Indian, the very lowest type of Mexicans are a 
group of fairly light mestizos, a strain of degenerates 
so numerous as to be given a distinct name — leperos. 
The middle class is mostly mestizo, and yet there 
are thousands of pure Indians who are properly 
included in this group of Mexicans who are rising 
by their own efforts. 

Culturally, the race parallel in Mexican classes is 
largely through two lines — education and dress. 
For generations, the children of the Mexican whites 
have been educated, as far as could be, in Europe 
and the United States, and where that was not pos- 
sible, in private, usually Roman Catholic, schools. 
From the beginning of Spanish rule, some of the 
mestizo children were especially provided for by 
institutions supported by the Crown — but the 
beneficiaries were only a few, and to this day the 
narrowness of the mestizo middle class is traceable 

116 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

in no small degree to the limitations of its educa- 
tional opportunities. The Indian has always been 
left almost to his own devices and to the hmited 
teaching which the Church could give; under 
Spanish rule he was usually taught practically noth- 
ing but religion and the rules of politeness belonging 
to his class. The thirty years of the Diaz rule, 
with its pitifully inadequate educational program, 
mark the only era in which any attempt was made 
to break down this educational cleavage. 

The dress of the Mexican does not concern us 
just here ^ but it suffices that from the London and 
Paris styles of the upper class, through the grada- 
tions of sartorial distinctions conferred on the 
mestizo middle class by native tailors down to the 
flowing white cotton pantaloons of the Indian, class 
and race hues are marked with the inevitability 
with which the cut of of a Frenchman's smock 
announces his calling. 

AJthough at first glance the complicated class 
divisions which are set down by Mexican sociolo- 
gists seem due to their Latin joy in dehcate dis- 
tinctions, the student of Mexican hfe early finds 
that these divisions are ingrained in the minds of 
the whole people.^ 

The very lowest class Mexicans are the leperos, 
the pariah mestizos, who have marked the country 



^ See part ii, chap, viii, Clothing. 

^ Judge Julio Guerrero's interesting book, La Genesis del Crimen 
en Mexico (Mexico, 1908), and, to a lesser degree, Andres Molina 
Enriquez's Las Grandes Problemas Nacionales (Mexico, 1912), 
may be taken in general as the authorities for the class divisions 
described below, though the scaling is new. 

117 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

in the foreign mind as a land where the natives touch 
water only on St. John's Day. They have no as- 
sured livelihood; and earn with difficulty the twenty 
or thirty centavos a day which keep body and soul 
together. They are mostly town dwellers, are sub- 
ject to all manner of diseases, and almost invariably 
die in early hfe. Their language is an almost unin- 
telligible argot, a combination of Spanish and Indian 
adorned with vile metaphors. Many of the lepe- 
ros are astonishingly white, apparently showing a 
large admixture of Spanish blood, although this 
may be in reality an indication of the separation of 
the strain into its primordial types through inter- 
breeding with close relatives, and thus of itself a 
physical sign of the degeneracy which their lives 
indicate.^ 

The lowest class of Indians includes not only 
the lower city types, but also a large number of 
those who still live in their distant villages and have 
almost no contact with the world outside, so that 
their social value is practically nothing. These 
village dwellers produce enough food for themselves, 
but none whatever for the market, and where they 
have found their way into the cities live in crowded 
hovels, degenerated by the alcohol and the diseases 
of the white man. 

Shghtly above the leperos and the low-caste 
Indians come the soldiers and their women, a class 
of Indians and mestizos practically unintelligent 
save on the animal plane, but the men wearing 
presentable clothes and the women camp followers 

1 See p. 41. 

H8 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

showing some improvement over the women of the 
leTpero class. 

From the soldier the transition, still in the lower 
class, is easy to the unskilled "slave" laborers of the 
haciendas, Indians and mestizos, some of them fair 
workers, essentially animal in instincts and appe- 
tites, yet imbued with certain ambitions. On the 
man's part we find here the desire for a great som- 
brero, and for prestige as a gambler and as a person 
of bravado, especially when he is in his cups. The 
women begin wearing copper and ebony finger rings, 
and silk handkerchiefs draped over their dirty rags 
indicate the beginnings of adornment. The men of 
this class, both Indians and mestizos, wear white 
pantaloons and shirt, and the women nondescript 
dark cotton dresses topped with the eternal blue 
cotton rehoso. 

The free, unskilled laborers are slightly above 
this group. These are the men who earned about 
a peso a day in the time of Diaz, and who main- 
tained some semblance of a household. The men 
of this class in the cities have begun to wear cloth 
trousers tight at the ankles and blouses instead of 
the white cotton suits just described, although they 
still wear sandals instead of shoes. The women 
wear long dresses of printed cotton, their hair is 
combed and braided, and, while they usually go 
barefooted, on state occasions they appear in high 
patent-leather shoes, but without stockings. There 
is some legal marriage in this group, but it is not 
common. The women are faithful to one man at a 

time, however, and are generally rehgious. The 

119 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

men usually have several affairs on hand which 
cause frequent quarrels and often bloodshed. In 
the cities this class lives in the unhealthful casas 
de vecindad where single rooms furnish a home for 
eight or ten people at a time. They are entirely 
illiterate and often know nothing of the world be- 
yond the immediate neighborhood in which they 
live and work. The use of artificial light begins 
with this class, and there is some furniture, first a 
rough table and chairs, even a bed of boards with a 
thin straw mattress. 

Next above come the Indians of better breed, the 
enterprising truck farmers of the city suburbs, the 
makers of baskets and pottery, a most important 
and interesting division of the aboriginal popula- 
tion, men and women of a degree of genuine intelli- 
gence, hopeful, intent on their work, living lives 
circumscribed by tradition and by ignorance, but 
capable of development, able to discuss their own 
small affairs, their own legends and superstitions, 
with native wit and shrewd appraisal of the listener. 
These are all native types, unmixed with white 
blood, but clean, self-respecting, and capable of 
real development under wise educational methods, 
could those be continued through several of their 
short generations. 

Above this class come the servants. They are 
paid low salaries but receive money with which to 
buy for themselves their tortillas, beans and chile, 
for they do not eat or like the more delicate foods 
of the upper classes. Industrial workers were 
being recruited from this class in the closing years 

120 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

of the Diaz regime, and it was distinctly a feeding 
ground for the lower reaches of the middle class. 
An interesting division is the country Mexicans 
who work as servants in the cities, saving their 
money in order to return in wealth to their home 
villages. These are found in all cities, and especially 
in the capital, and indicate the growth of forward- 
looking ambition. They usually work as husband 
and wife and have been married in the church. In 
this class are both mestizos and Indians, the former 
predominating. 

In the industrial field the employees are still to 
be considered as belonging to the lower stratum, for 
there is only the faint beginning of industrial ambi- 
tion, and the limitations of class are heavy on the 
minds of the workers. The disturbing factors of 
socialism and the political chaos in Mexico to-day 
are transforming many members of this class, but 
the group itself remains, the more ambitious ones 
merely passing into other divisions. The simple- 
minded factory worker toils on stolidly, poorly paid 
as we judge it, but better than he has ever been at 
anything else. This class remains at its work, 
strangely enough, through all the turmoil of revo- 
lution, the firm, lower class upon whom such a land 
as Mexico must still depend for a few years longer. 

From these we move into the middle class proper, 
if we may make the arbitrary division. And at the 
bottom may be placed the policeman of the cities 
and the rural police (of the Diaz time) of the coun- 
try. Here is a man who can read and write a little, 
and on his shoulders his responsibilities rest with a 

121 



THE PEOPLE OP MEXICO 

Castilian pompousness, perhaps, but still with 
some degree of safety for the commonwealth. Next 
comes the new class of skilled artisans, distinctively 
the growth of the Diaz regime, and typified by the 
railway employees, both mestizos and Indians, who 
carried on the traffic of the steel highways with 
some efficiency as the Americans were gradually 
replaced after the merger which created the Na- 
tional Railways of Mexico in 1908, though, since 
the expulsion of all foreign executives in 1914, their 
success has not been so marked. Noncomtmis- 
sioned officers of the old army, the clerks in the 
stores and the small shopkeepers, the real begin- 
nings of the middle class of the republic, follow in 
ascending grade. 

This lower middle class should also include the 
lower clergy, who are often placed in the lower class, 
although, with all their defects, they are to a certain 
extent educated, and although poorly paid and not 
always carefully selected, do wear shoes — an un- 
failing mark of class distinction in Mexico. These 
priests and curates are Indians or low-caste mestizos. 

In dress the lower middle class is distinguished by 
shoes and by ponderous black felt hats, while the 
women wear the black merino shawl instead of the 
eternal blue cotton reboso of the peon women, have 
calico dresses, worn very long, also in unmistakable 
cut. Corsets and lingerie are almost unknown, but 
they use handkerchiefs, as do the men, and knives 
and forks, though napkins are in the distant cul- 
tural future. The residence is in a flat or tiny hut 
of two or three rooms, fairly clean and furnished. 

122 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

Masculine fidelity is not frequent, but the women 
are faithful and good Catholics. 

The upper ranks of the middle class include the 
government clerks and minor officials, the "bureau- 
crats" who go back to the mestizo government em- 
ployes of colonial times. They approximate the 
English clerk class in many ways, live and dress 
well, have distinct codes and manners, and are 
extremely ambitious socially. 

In times of revolution, the bureaucratic division 
of Mexican society suffers from strange and aston- 
ishing invasions. All the generals and bandits who 
rise to power invade the cities and seek and achieve 
recognition and welcome from the often cringing 
politicians. Quite incapable of entering the ranks 
of the intellectuals or the aristocracy, they are igno- 
rant of the existence of the former at least and con- 
tent themselves with basking in the light of the so- 
ciety of the bureaucrats and their families. But 
these temporary accessions almost all ultimately 
slip back in the scale, for they find the exactions of 
bourgeois society very wearing. 

The men of the bureaucratic class are well dressed 
in the native variants of European style, as far as 
their incomes allow, and their women follow the 
Mexican version of Parisian fashions. All the 
foibles of the hour are found, often worn only as a 
badge of position before the outside world, but at 
least owned and enjoyed as such. 

At this point in the class scale we find the first 
foreigners. The Spanish clerks are the lowest, but 
their long hours of labor in the grocery stores often 

123 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

result in their accumulating a small capital and 
perhaps marrying the daughters of their employers 
or middle-class Mexican girls, settling down and 
remaining as part of the Mexican middle class of 
merchants. 

Next come the Frenchmen, in the pre-revolution 
days typified by the dry -goods clerks, called 
''calicoes," an unstable, non-marrying class which 
seldom remains long in Mexico. The French colony 
of business men is, however, a substantial and pow- 
erful element, ranking with the best English and 
Americans. 

The Germans are next in the scale, having come 
to Mexico as clerks and accountants, learning 
Spanish quickly and thoroughly, and settling down 
in Mexico, very often marrying Mexican girls of 
wealth. Germans have always wielded consider- 
able power in Mexico, and under Carranza, owing to 
political machinations, were the most important 
element of the foreign population. 

The Americans and the Enghsh stand at the head 
of the list of foreigners. Under Diaz the Ameri- 
cans were divided, not only in their own cliques, but 
also in the Mexican mind, into a lower grade repre- 
sented by the railway men and, as it happened, the 
fakers, adventurers, and tramps, and the higher 
ranks represented by the railway executives, bank- 
ers, business men, and those interested in industries. 
The latter, with whom must be ranked most of the 
British in Mexico before the 1910 revolution, un- 
doubtedly wielded much influence, due to their 
financial standing and their genuine interest in and 

124 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

identification with the development of the country. 
The Mexicans, however, justly regarded them as 
temporary residents and noted their inability to 
mix socially with the natives, and the extremely few 
international marriages. 

The true upper class of the Mexicans themselves 
is made up first of the members of the professions, 
a numerous group of lawyers, doctors, engineers, 
teachers, artists, newspaper men, etc. Like China, 
Mexico gives rank and place to all who would be- 
come her mandarins of professional life, no matter 
what their origin. A vast majority of these pro- 
fessional men have no standing as intellectuals, and 
do not seek it, but, because of their education and 
degrees, take definite social place. 

Above the mass of professional men, but below the 
true intellectuals, come the business men, who were 
interested, often with foreigners in the old days, in 
national enterprises. This class of "self-made 
men" was one of the great achievements of the 
Diaz regime, and it is to these whites and mestizos 
who have got close to Mexico's problems that we 
must look for the practical side of the regeneration 
of the country. After the passing of Diaz, and 
during the brief rules of de la Barra and Madero, 
they sprang to the front with working theories on 
the more idealistic side of the lines in which they 
had been engaged in the days of Diaz, and to-day 
many of them, in exile, are continuing their plans 
against the time when they may return to work 
them out. 

Next above come the true intellectuals of Mexico, 

125 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

a group of men not confined to the capital by any 
means, but well educated in the Latin sense, keen 
students of their country and its problems, men 
capable of taking a place in any company, scientists, 
philosophers, teachers, writers, poets, archaeologists, 
sociologists, and economists. 

The aristocracy, based on heritage of blood and 
property, stand at the top. Here are most of the 
hacendados and many of the government officials 
under the old regime — almost all now in exile, but 
an important part of the Mexican social organiza- 
tion. These upper classes, practically all Spanish 
Creoles, as one has said, ''preserve the graces of the 
Bourbon period of France" with charm and ele- 
gance. When they have dabbled in business other 
than the management of their great farms or 
haciendas, they are often successful, and in the ele- 
gant arts and the elegant professions of the law 
and the Church, have attained not a little of the 
perfection of accomplishment which fills the imagina- 
tion and suits the picture of true aristocracy. As 
a rule, this class has never occupied itself with poli- 
tics, but has left to the middle class the determining 
of policies and the carrying out of revolutions. 
There are, of course, genuine and significant excep- 
tions. Those capable aristocrats whom Diaz gath- 
ered around him were men of birth and genuine 
executive ability. Whatever may have been said 
regarding their probity or their wisdom, the mag- 
nificent efforts which they devoted to the great 
Mexican problems during this period more than 
outweigh the criticisms which have been showered 

126 



CASTES AND CLASSES 

upon them. That they were aristocrats to the 
bone, that their attitude may have been at variance 
with modern sociology, that their economics may 
have been faulty, that their business instincts may 
have been archaic, does not change the fact that 
the Mexican aristocracy had a tremendous respon- 
sibility and to a certain extent its individuals ful- 
filled that responsibility. 

This group has been destroyed or scattered from 
Mexico by her political upheavals. Practically no 
strong men of high type have appeared in the 
revolutionary horizon, and, indeed, in the whole 
Mexican field to-day there is no true upper class. 
The aristocrats are in exile, the intellectuals who 
gave color and idealism to the Madero revolution 
have either died at the hands of the bloody suc- 
cessors of Madero or are in exile like the old aristo- 
crats, stigmatized as reactionaries. All this may 
indeed be the fault of the men who surrounded Diaz 
and who failed to lift the level of the dull, unthinking 
mass toward their own intelligence, the recurrence 
of the age-old failure of those in power to raise up a 
generation of strong men to succeed them. 

It seems, however, that in this, as in all else in 
Mexico, we must trace our way slowly back to 
race, to the long lethargy and apathy of racial 
stratification, and see not the failure to do more, 
but the wonder that they could do so much. For 
three hundred years Mexican race castes evolved 
slowly into the Mexican class divisions we have seen 
here; for only thirty years was it possible, on the 
social plane, to apply modern government and 
9 127 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

sociology to the problem. Race built the solid 
wall to which caste and class have conformed them- 
selves, and back to race we must go again for our 
understanding of the class line and for the solution 
which will some day be found — a solution of race 
and of education, the elements through an under- 
standing of which came the brief development of 
that middle class of artisans who are to-day lending 
almost all there is of stability to Mexican govern- 
ment by bandit and bureaucrat. 



PART II 
HOW THEY LIVE 



CLIMATE 

MEXICO lies in the midst of the Americas, a 
great cornucopia, but the riches and the fruits 
hidden therein do not pour forth with the prodigahty 
of legend. The mouth of the cornucopia is rigidly 
upright, symbolic of the situation throughout the 
history of this traditional treasure house. For 
four hundred years Mexico has stood in the vocabu- 
laries of those who have talked of her as a horn of 
plenty, a land lavish beyond dreams, but she has 
yet to record the real pouring forth of any gar- 
gantuan riches. Gold and silver, yes; but gold and 
silver, and the oil which to-day rivals the minerals 
in production, are the impersonal, tangible wealth 
which belongs to the world and to anyone who can 
carry it away. The wealth that pours from cornu- 
copias is the wealth of fruits and grains, of fabrics 
and of manufactures, the wealth that is essen- 
tially and personally that of the people and of the 
nation. 

Since the days of the conquerors Mexico has been 
thus extravagantly described, and yet, since those 

days and long before them she has proven anything 

131 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

but a horn of plenty for the inhabitants of the land. 
Despite the wealth which has been wrung from 
beneath her soil from mines and oil wells, she must 
rank as an essentially poor country. Lying almost 
entirely in the tropics, where, theoretically, fruits 
and flowers grow in profusion, in reahty nearly 
three-fourths of Mexico is desert, and of the en- 
tire area of about 500,000,000 acres not over 25,- 
000,000 acres can be called suitable for the pro- 
duction of the agricultural products which the 
people need. 

Climate is the chief determinant of the conditions 
under which Mexico's inhabitants must Hve, the 
overwhelming element of her environment. That 
the zone of achievement which belts our globe is 
confined almost entirely to the north temperate 
zone is no mere accident of topography or race dis- 
tribution. In that zone there are benignant mnter 
snows which nurture the cereal crops, and .summer 
suns that ripen them; there is a broad distribution 
of rainfall throughout the year; there are clay sub- 
soils and vegetable molds and great river systems 
with rich valleys and well-drained highlands. In 
tropical Mexico there is no winter season. The 
climate varies from scorching desert to dank 
jungle, and from the glaring sands of the Gulf to 
the delightfully equable seasons of the mountain 
slopes, but snow never falls upon her wheat fields 
and rain comes either in a short, uncertain "rainy 
season" or in tropic torrents that vitiate agriculture 
by their unhappy abundance. 

Overwhelming is the influence of rainfall in 

132 



CLIMATE 

Mexico, but behind it are the five great factors 
which always determine the relation of climate to 
human progress. The first of these is the mean or 
average temperature in its relation to physical 
energy; second the mean temperature as related 
to mental activity; third, the variation and range 
in temperature; fourth, humidity; fifth, altitude. 
The ideal climate has a mean summer temperature 
of 65°, giving the season most favorable to physical 
exertion, and a winter temperature of 40°, the great- 
est stimulant to mental activity. The ideal varia- 
tion in temperature would give some warm days in 
winter and some cool days in summer, produced by 
such ordinary storms as vary the climate in the 
United States and England. The favorable condi- 
tion of humidity is about 60 per cent at noon in 
summer and nearly 100 per cent at night, produc- 
ing dews after sundown. The ideal of the fifth 
point would be an altitude of not more than 3,000 
feet.i 

Mexico has three distinct types of climate, to be 
found in three definite geological zones. The tierra 
caliente, or hot country, is the lowland section along 
the coasts from sea level to an altitude of 3,000 
feet, where the yearly average temperature is be- 



^ These limitations of the "optima" of climatic efficiency are 
those of Prof. Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, the great American 
climatologist. Much of the chmatic data in this chapter is also 
due to his courtesy and to his pubhshed and unpublished material, 
including "The Relation of Health to Racial Capacity — The Ex- 
ample of Mexico," Geographical Review, 1920, and "The Factor of 
Health in Mexican Character," read at the Clark University Con- 
ference on Mexico and the Caribbean, 1920. 

133 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

tween 76° and 88° Fahrenheit. The Mexican in- 
cludes in the hot country not only the lowlands 
south of the Tropic of Cancer, but the whole coastal 
plain up to Matamoras on the Gulf of Mexico and 
to California on the Pacific. The tierra templada 
lies along the mountain slopes and in the lower 
plateaus, including the sections whose altitude is 
between 3,000 and 6,500 feet and where the annual 
mean temperatures are between 65° and 76°. This 
climatic zone includes most of the area of the north- 
ern deserts as well as the finer southern mountain 
slopes and lower plateaus. The tierra fria, or cold 
country, includes the high plateaus and the moun- 
tains, the section of Mexico lying between 6,500 
and 12,500 feet altitude, where the yearly aver- 
age temperatures vary from 30° to 64°, although 
in reahty the temperatures of the populated sec- 
tions are generally 50° or above. The three 
climatic zones each cover approximately one- 
third of the area of the country. About haK 
the inhabitants live in the cold zone, and roughly 
a quarter each in the temperate and the hot 
country. 

The three zones natm-ally have differing relations 
to the climatic factors set down above, but it should 
be remembered that these differences are due more 
to altitude than to latitude. The following table, 
taken from official reports, gives a picture of the 
relation of mean temperatm-es and seasonal range 
to these elements of latitude and altitude. The 
table is arranged with the most northerly towns 
first, the most southerly last: 

134 



CLIMATE 





Mean Temperatures 




Coldest 


Warmest 


Matamoras 

Monterrey 

Saltillo 


Fahrenheit 
63 
56 
53 
54 
52 
55 
72 
53 
70 
63 
75 


Fahrenheit 
84 
85 
73 
73 
66 
71 
83 
65 
82 
73 
82 


Durango 


Zacateeas 

San Luis Potosi . . . 
Merida 


Mexico City 

Vera Cruz 

Oaxaca 


Salina Cruz 



Seasonal 
Range 



Fahrenheit 
21 
29 
20 
19 
14 
16 
11 
12 
12 
10 
7 



Altitude 



Sea level 
1,600 feet 
5,400 " 
6,200 " 
8,200 " 
6,200 " 
Sea level 
7,500 feet 
Sea level 
5,162 feet 
Sea level 



The first and second of the five climatic elements 
mentioned are the mean temperature in its relation 
to physical and mental energy, 65° being the best 
for the former and 40° for the latter. At Vera 
Cruz the mean temperature of the coldest months 
of the year is 70°, which is 5° higher than that favor- 
able to physical health and 30° above that which is 
best for mental activity, while in summer the aver- 
age is about 85°, which is more than 10° higher 
than the hottest month in New York City. In 
general, in the hot country, the body struggles with 
a temperature averaging 20° higher than its best 
efficiency, but the brain, with the handicap of 40° 
more than the relatively mild winters of the tem- 
perate zone, tends literally to stagnate. In Mexico 
City, on the plateau, the coldest month averages 
53°, which is 13° higher than the best tempemture 
for mental activity, and the warmest month is 65°, 
which would be the ideal for physical exertion, if 
altitude and humidity were not unfavorable. 

In the most densely populated section of Mexico, 

135 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

in the so-called ''cold country," the coolest month 
does not average below 50°, which is the tem- 
perature of April in New York City, and half the 
people of Mexico live v/here the coolest months 
average 60°, the temperature of May in New York. 
In addition to the low stimulus of this temperature 
to mental activity, the monotony of the endless 
spring days which it predicates has another effect 
on physical health, for it seems to make the Mexi- 
cans and even the foreigners who have long resided 
there extremely sensitive to cold, so that they have 
little power of resisting even the relatively mild 
chill which accompanies the "northers" or pre- 
vailing storms from the Gulf of Mexico. 

It is the location of Mexico mthin the tropics 
that is responsible for the enervating sameness of 
temperature which gives almost the whole country 
the most debilitating type of weather from the view- 
point of variety. There is little variation in tem- 
perature even in the procession of the seasons, and 
winter and summer are but slightly distinguished 
even in the cooler regions. The northern part of 
the country is in the temperate zone, but even there 
the difference between the coolest and warmest 
months is but 25°, which is only one half the sea- 
sonal variation of Chicago. In tropical Mexico 
(and this includes both ''hot country" and "cold 
coimtry," for both are below the Tropic of Cancer) 
the seasonal variation is only 10° to 15°, a quarter 
of the seasonal variation of New York. In Mexico 
City (altitude 7,500 feet), for instance, the differ- 
ences in mean temperatures between January and 

X36. 



CLIMATE 

May, the coldest and wannest months, is 13°, while 
in Vera Cruz, at sea level, the similar difference is 
12°, for the two cities are in the same latitude. 

There is a considerable variation, however, be- 
tween day and night on the high plateau as well as 
in the north, though in the lowlands night and day 
are much alike. There is about 25° difference be- 
tween day and night in such plateau towns as 
Oaxaca and Zacatecas, but at Vera Cruz the average 
is but 6°. This variation might do much to save 
the health and energy of the plateau dwellers if 
it were not for the custom of shutting themselves 
up at night and covering their mouths and noses 
whenever they go out into the night air. There is 
a tradition in Mexico that the night air is poisonous, 
and surely it tends to become so when one refrains 
from sleeping or going out in it. However, no one 
who maintains fresh-air habits in Mexico suffers 
from the night air. 

In contrast with the variation between night and 

day is the practical uniformity of one day after 

another. The average change is less than 2° 

Fahrenheit, so that one can predict the type of day 

from one year's end to another. In the United 

States the change from day to day is three or more 

times that of Mexico. The only daily variations 

in temperature come in the sudden ''northers," 

whose changes are likely to be more dangerous 

than healthful, and in the brief respite from summer 

heat which follows the showers of the "rainy 

season." The "cold country" is often visited by 

frosts in the winter, but these are disastrously un- 

137 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

certain and have almost no stimulating effect, 
owing to the traditional fear of night air. So com- 
plete is the sameness of the temperature that vic- 
tims of ''colds " at almost any season in the Mexican 
highlands find a trip to the tierra templada indis- 
pensable in order to get the change needed for a 
cure. 

The humidity of Mexico could hardly be more 
disadvantageous to health, physical and mental. 
In the rainy season the saturation of the air often 
reaches 95 per cent even in the ''cold country," 
and in the dry season it falls to virtually nothing. 
In the "hot country" summer air reeks with con- 
tinued moisture, and the combination of high tem- 
perature and a water-soaked atmosphere is ex- 
tremely depressing; in the dry season, whether on 
the northern deserts or on the plateau, the lack of 
moisture in the air seems nerve racking and destruc- 
tive to mental poise.^ 

In altitude, the hot country of Mexico, being 
close to sea level, is well below the 3,000-foot 
maximum limit for the best climatic efficiency, and 
so furnishes the one favorable condition in this 
section. On the other hand, on the table-lands of 
tropical Mexico, the elevation, well above the 
efficient limit, is the chief deterrent factor, and the 
favorable feature is the fact that the mean tem- 
perature of 65°, as well as- the averages for winter 
(about 55°) and for summer (about 70°), are close 
to the ideal for physical health. Here the Indians 
are strong and hardy, but the endless train of 

^ Cf. E. Huntington, World Power and Evolution, p. 85. 
138 



CLIMATE 

delightful but unstimulating days combines with 
the wearing altitude to reduce the vitality of the 
more nervous types, so that we find prevalent a 
physical laxity surprisingly Uke that of the lazy hot 
country. The result, then, is that, as far as his 
general attitude toward life is concerned, the Mexi- 
can is very much the same the country over, the 
only difference being in the physical strength and 
endurance (though without great energy) of Indians 
of the high plateaus, which has been traditional 
since the days of Cortez. Among the whites and 
many of the mixed bloods the combination of alti- 
tude and dryness has a definite effect on the nervous 
system, and the traditional excitability and in- 
stability of the Creoles may, therefore, have a clear 
climatic explanation. 

This is the background of temperature, humidity, 
and altitude upon which the yet more important 
factor of rainfall is thrown into relief. The rainy 
season all over Mexico extends roughly from June 
to September, and the dry season from October to 
May. Still well north of the equator, Mexico has 
practically the same divisions of the four seasons 
as in the United States, but these seasons in Mexico 
are marked by rain and drought more sharply than 
by the variation in temperature. Without going 
too deeply into the reasons for the rainfall condi- 
tions in Mexico, we may summarize Professor 
Huntington's analysis of the three main climatic 
conditions of Mexico; first, the summer rains due 
to the vertical rays of the sun at that season; 
gecond, the great stretches of desert in the north, 

139 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

due to the same conditions of trade winds and high 
barometric pressm'e which make the Sahara desert; 
and third, the winter storms which are popularly 
called '^ northers." The direct rays of the sun fall- 
ing upon the central portion of Mexico in summer 
heat the earth and thus the air; the heated air 
rises rapidly and the sudden expansion brings 
about the condensation of moisture into clouds and 
rain. The great stretches of desert in the north 
are the result not only of the general circulation of 
the atmosphere, but also of the mountain contour 
combined with the distance from the eastern sea- 
shore and the influence of the so-called continental 
type of climate which has formed the American 
desert farther north. The '' northers" are the 
fringes of the storms which sweep over the United 
States in winter and sometimes carry frost as far 
south as Florida. 

The obvious results of these three climatic ten- 
dencies are the contrast between the very wet 
southern portion of the country and the very dry 
northern; the very wet rainy season and the dry, 
almost rainless winter; the contrast between the 
eastern slopes of the mountains, which are moist, 
and the dry western slopes, and the contrast be- 
tween the usual warm sunny winter days and the 
occasionally raw, chilly ones which are to the Mexi- 
can more trying than is zero weather to the natives 
of the temperate zone. 

The rains usually fall during the rainy season for 
a few hoiirs in the early afternoon, and are accom- 
panied by thunder and lightning. In the south the 

140 



CLIMATE 

rainfall is often almost continuous, but there are 
sometimes intermissions, after which the rain seems 
to come with renewed vigor, sometimes a fall of 
six inches in thirty-six hours following a period of 
drought. In the central regions of Mexico the 
rainfall is moderate and fairly well marked by the 
seasons, so that it is here that agriculture flourishes 
and the centers of population have grown up. 
Here the rainfall is about the same for the year as 
in the United States — from thirty to fifty inches. 
On the west coast and in the north the rainfall is 
very slight, western Sonora, for instance, ranging 
from five to thirteen inches, while Lower California 
is sometimes dry for years on end. The length of 
the wet season varies with the annual rainfall, from 
seven months (October to May) on the plateau, 
with thirty to fifty inches a year, to ten months in 
the jungles of Chiapas, where there are one hundred 
inches a year. 

Influencing rainfall and also the distribution of 
arable land is the contour of the country. Two 
thirds of all the territory of Mexico is covered by 
mountain ranges. These are in the form of an 
immense "Y," the two upper points skirting the 
borders of the cornucopia, joining near the center 
of the country and covering it broadly to the south. 
On the eastern, or Gulf, side there is a wide coastal 
plain, but on the west the mountains extend almost 
to the Pacific. Between the two arms of the ''Y" 
in the north are the great desert stretches of Chi- 
huahua, Coahuila, Durango, and Zacatecas. The 
rainstorms of Mexico come generally from the Gulf 

141 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of Mexico, and the eastern slopes of the Mexican 
mountains are, therefore, well watered; the Gulf 
coastal plain is covered with jungle growths for 
almost its whole length, and the eastern sides of 
the mountains are always a surprising contrast of 
verdure to the western slopes. This seems due to 
the fact that the winds blow almost invariably from 
the east and northeast, the rains being precipitated 
by the mountains, while the clouds rise to the 
summit and pass over the western side without pre- 
cipitation. The most important agricultural sec- 
tions of Mexico, and at the same time the most 
satisfactory regions for human habitation, are the 
plateaus and valleys on the eastern mountain slopes 
and the great table-land of south central Mexico, 
which vary in altitude from 4,000 to 7,500 feet 
and comprise the most densely populated and most 
prosperous sections of the repubhc. 

Although the contour of Mexico would indicate 
that there should be great rivers, there are prac- 
tically none. Half a dozen partially navigable 
streams poiu" into the Gulf of Mexico, but the dis- 
tance they traverse is, except in the case of those 
of the state of Tabasco, so slight as to make them 
of little value either for transportation or irrigation. 
The rain which falls on the mountains in and around 
the plateau country creates practically no rivers 
save at the height of the downpour, the moisture 
being absorbed in a porous soil, to be carried down 
under the surface to points on the eastern face of the 
mountains, where they spring out again, forming 
sudden waterfalls and riotous mountain streams. 

142 



CLIMATE 

The ''hidden river" is a commonplace in Mexico, as 
are great waterfalls which tempt the engineer to 
dream of immense krigation projects and great 
water-power developments. But such engineering 
enterprises have proven extremely and often un- 
expectedly expensive, owing to the porousness of 
the soil and the shortness and irregularity of the 
rainy season. Immense storage facilities are vital 
to any such plan in Mexico, as was discovered at 
Necaxa (when the hydro-electric power for Mexico 
City was developed). There it was found that 
although an immense head of water — about 1,300 
feet — ^could be obtained, dams in the narrow moun- 
tain valleys could hold back only a small per- 
centage of the water which came down in the tor- 
rential rainy season. Attempts to hold water in 
the plateau above were either ineffectual or ex- 
tremely expensive, owing to the fact that, although 
an ordinary dam would create a vast reservoir, 
quantities of the impounded water would seep 
through the soft soil and porous rock and actually 
waste away into hidden springs and underground 
rivers before it could be used for power generation. 
There has, however, been irrigation in Mexico 
from time immemorial. Many of the conmaunal 
lands of the Indians before the Spaniards came were 
irrigated through long canals, and the distribution 
of property was often upon the basis of the amount 
of land which could be cultivated with the water 
which was allowed the individual farmer — in other 
words, the water was the desirable property, and 
the value of the land was recognized as dependent 



10 



143 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

on water rights. There was, however, no storage 
against the dry season, and this irrigation was 
practiced only where the streams, fed by springs, 
flowed the year around, or where water could be 
lifted from underground rivers by the crude native 
foot wheels. 

Toward the end of the Diaz regime a number of 
franchises were given, mostly to foreigners, and the 
sum of P90,000,000 also set aside for the develop- 
ment of irrigation. Under the Mexican laws of 
that period all such irrigation projects were allowed 
only on the provision that the concessionaire on the 
completion of his work should turn over to the 
Federal government a large share of the irrigated 
lands for distribution in small agricultural holdings; 
in some cases the amount to be given the govern- 
ment totaled more than a third of the lands which 
were watered. This was the beginning of a thor- 
oughly intelligent distribution of land, as under this 
plan the property would be really available for cul- 
tivation, in contrast with the revolutionary schemes 
of redistributing land almost worked out or unirri- 
gated land not adapted to the growing of food 
crops. In a country like Mexico irrigation must be 
done on a scale which only large capital or govern- 
ment can compass, and without irrigation land dis- 
tribution to farmers who have no capital has proven 
worse than useless. 

The comphcated land question of Mexico is, in 
the last analysis, one of climate and rainfall. 
Mexico's agrarian problem has been succinctly 
stated as being, not the mere distribution, but the 

144 



CLIMATE 

actual creation of lands for the people. As noted 
at the beginning of this chapter, only about 25,000,- 
000 acres of the 500,000,000 of Mexico's area are 
arable, a fact due primarily to rainfall and the other 
factors of climate. Irrigation is the only means of 
''creating" new sections of arable land, and land 
distribution, legal or revolutionary, will not im- 
prove conditions unless the land can be successfully 
tilled. 

Great sections of Mexico are arid; the state of 
Chihuahua, 90,000 square miles in extent, has only 
about 125,000 acres (two tenths of 1 per cent) of ara- 
ble land, most of that irrigated, while other desert 
states have only 2 per cent or 3 per cent of their 
area under cultivation, a condition due far more to 
rainfall conditions than to ruggedness or any other 
factor. Even the production of the soil that is 
cultivated in Mexico is not only low, but it is rapidly 
decreasing, due to the wasteful extensive farming 
methods (as contrasted with "intensive farming"), 
in the creation of which weather conditions have 
had much to do. Baron von Humboldt wrote in 
1803 that the production of Mexican farms was 
150 fold (that is, 150 grains of corn for every 
grain sowed). This is estimated at about 86 
bushels per acre.^ To-day, on the other hand, an 
average return in the typical agricultural district 
about Monterrey (where the rainfall is twenty-two 

1 This astonishing figure, astonishing in fact as well as in com- 
parison with present Mexican corn crops, is given as the equivalent 
of a 150-fold return by Francisco Bulnes in The Whole Truth 
About Mexico, p. 44. Mexican farmers still count their yield 
by the return per seed planted. 

145 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

inches per year) is 7 bushels per acre for dry 
farming, 15 for land under irrigation, and 25 bushels 
per acre with selected seed on the fertilized and irri- 
gated farms of a Canadian company, whose prize 
plot of 70 acres produces 52 bushels per acre. 
When it is remembered that over forty-five years, 
good and bad, the whole state of Kansas averaged 
22 bushels of corn per acre, that fair Kansas com 
land produces 35 bushels, and the best farms, over 
their full area of 160 to 320 acres, 75 bushels per 
acre,^ one can gain some realization of the conditions 
which the climate has forced on Mexico. 

The figures for the Monterrey section are taken 
because they not only show the poverty'- of ordinary 
production, but the appalling scale of difference 
between the dry-farming product, the ordinary irri- 
gated, the well irrigated and fertilized, and the 
"prize" sections where acclimated Kansas seed 
corn is used. There are especially fine corn-growing 
farms in Mexico where returns of 100 bushels per 
acre are obtained from two crops, 50 bushels per 
crop, but even there the rainfall conditions are such 
that crops of this sort are harvested only once every 
five to ten years. Average crops of the good corn- 
raising sections of Mexico are 8 to 12 bushels per 
acre, under dry-farming conditions. The use of 
good seed and deep cultivation are to a very great 
extent responsible where there are good showings, 
but above all the climate and rainfall, including 
both total precipitation and favorable distribution 

* Data furnished by J. C. Mohler, secretary, Kansas State 
Board of Agriculture. 

146 



CLIMATE 

throughout the growing season, are the chief 
factors of every successful farming conununity. 

The cHmate may thus be held largely responsible 
for most of the poor crop conditions in Mexico. 
Without irrigation the uncertain rainfall and the 
fact that much of what falls is so irregular or comes 
at such times as to be useless, create a condition 
where intensive farming only adds to the expense 
without making the crop any surer. The Mexican 
dry farmer is the greatest of all gamblers, for 
where in England a crop of 85 per cent of average 
is a calamity and in Germany before the war a 90- 
per-cent crop was a serious matter, the Mexican 
farmer is not discouraged if he averages crops that 
are but 25 per cent of normal. Farming in Mexico 
is handled on the basis of ''getting out" if there is 
a good crop every seven years, and Mexican crop 
experts hold that if intensive farming were fol- 
lowed, the increased cost, with weather conditions 
always against the farmer, would eat up all the 
profit possible from the increased yield in the 
good years. 

Under these conditions most efforts to induce in- 
tensive farming have been futile, and will remain so 
until irrigation can be harnessed to give assurance 
of the moistmre which is the primary requisite of 
all agriculture. Baron von Humboldt's conclusions 
regarding the rich future of Mexico were un- 
doubtedly based on the belief that intensive agricul- 
ture could be made successful — ^his rain statistics 
were, in 1803, inadequate and most inexact. But 
the country continues to-day, one hundred and 

147 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

twenty years later, as she has for untold centuries, 
on the plane of the most wasteful of extensive 
cultivation, save only where iiTigation has given 
impetus to industry and where long tradition has 
softened the crudeness of Indian wastefulness. 

It is impossible in a work of .tliis general character 
to go farther into the land and crop problem, but 
it should be noted that, owing to weather condi- 
tions, the so-called ninety-day corn requires about 
one hundred and twenty days to mature in the 
temperate zones, and on the plateaus, where most 
of the food crops are raised, it grows no more rapidly 
than the ordinaiy varieties, requiring six or seven 
months to ripen. This long growing season and 
the danger of frosts in this section add another 
factor to the uncertainty of clunate.^ 

For Mexico laiows famine — to her bitter cost. 
The single phase of climate may not, indeed, be the 
only factor which contributes to the recurring 
ravages of hunger, but beside it such problems as 
the system of land distribution, the difficulties of 
comnumication and the customs which place one 
third of the corn production in the hands of small 
farmers who raise only enough for their personal 
needs, are greatly minimized. Indeed, in the last 
analysis, climate has much to do with these prob- 
lems, for land distribution has been to a certain 
extent determined by climate ; the lack of rivers and 
the poor roads certainly have a climatic first cause, 
and the apathy of the Indian farmer, who hopelessly 
plants only enough corn for himself because all the 

^ Francisco Bulnes, oj), cit. p. 47. 

148 



CLIMATE 

odds are against his getting a crop anyway, is in 
part at least due to the discouraging rainfall. 

But in the larger sense we have seen climate and 
above all inadequate rainfall as the great Nemesis 
which ever hangs over Mexico, the most cruel and 
evil genius of her destiny. Indian tradition reach- 
ing back into farthest antiquity told of famines 
succeeding one another, and one of the high spots 
of Aztec civilization was the fact that there had 
not been a devastating famine for forty years! 
Under Spain there were serious droughts and 
periods of great suffermg, and during the time of 
Diaz Mexico was often saved from similar experi- 
ences tlirough the medium of world distriVjution 
which brought the surplus of the United States and 
Argentine to her rescue. 

Baron von Humboldt, studying Mexico in 1803, 
wrote many basic truths about Mexico, as well as 
laying the foundations for many of the fantastic 
claims which still persist regarding her wealth. 
He spoke again and again of the fanunes which 
wasted Mexico in historic time, and added that 
"the disproportion between the growth of the 
population and the increase of the food supply 
through cultivation renews the sad spectacle of 
famine whenever, through a great drought, or some 
other local cause, the corn crop fails." ^ Always 
those great droughts menace, and since the failure 
of government to make irrigation possible and the 
destruction of the great estates which, despite 

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of 
New Spain, vol. i, p. 69. 

J49 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

their mistakes, did furnish something of the large 
organization necessary to food production in 
Mexico, the great droughts which the climate will 
inevitably bring loom more terrible than ever. No 
Joseph is in Mexico to warn her dusky Pharaohs, 
and were he there, there is no surplus to store up — 
only the despised hacendados had the organization 
to raise a surplus and the wisdom to store it. 

For famine still stalks in Mexico. It is easy to 
attribute the growing importations of food into 
Mexico during the Diaz period to the diversion of 
increasing numbers of her laborers to industry, but 
the erratic variations in the importations were 
undoubtedly due to more or less serious crop 
failures. Since the revolutions there has been 
another easy explanation — the bandit raids un- 
doubtedly have discouraged food raising for the 
market. But in 1917 there was a genuine famine 
in northern Mexico which was not due to banditry. 
The ofhcial American records show the facts, for 
the city of Monterrey was saved only through the 
enterprise of her American residents, who imported 
many carloads of corn, contributed by the American 
Red Cross, to feed the people. The direct cause of 
this famine was a serious and far-reaching drought, 
but the world was very busy in 1917, and because 
the famine was not the result of banditry primarily, 
it passed with little notice. But famine it was, and 
famine with direct climatic causes. 

And famine will come again, and again it will be 
traceable directly to climate, and it may well 
happen that the next great climax in Mexico's 

150 



CLIMATE 

history will be a nation-wide hunger which her 
strength, sapped by war and graft, cannot avert, 
which no charities can alleviate, and which no fair 
words or glowing promises can conceal. For Mexico 
is still in the making, and still heredity and environ- 
ment, race and cUmate, are determining the nature 
of her people, race the great matrix in which mold 
was cast, climate the chisel which has shaped the 
conditions under which they live and the health 
v/hich inexorably decrees the way in which they 
think. 



II 

THE MEXICAN COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

THE Mexican conununity consists of a popula- 
tion of some 15,000,000 mixed Spanish and 
Indian peoples distributed, chiefly in villages and 
small cities, over a triangular, largely mountainous, 
area of 767,000 square miles lying to the southwest 
of the United States. Its government is a republic 
of thirty states and territories, patterned in theory 
on the federalized system of the United States, but 
in actuality centralized and dominated by the na- 
tional ruler or dictator, from Congress and the 
judiciary down to the most insignificant village 
official. 

The community life and the system of govern- 
ment are alike the result of the combination of the 
customs and systems of the two races which make 
up the people. In the larger phases of government, 
however, it is the Spanish heritage which is strong- 
est, while in the community life and in the systems 
of rule in the villages and even in the larger towns, 
Indian tradition and standards dominate. 

The feudal system, which had all but passed in 
Europe when Columbus set sail for America, was 

152 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

transplanted bodily to the Spanish colonies and 
became the chief basis of their government for the 
three centuries of colonial rule. Since the inde- 
pendence, although the forms of Mexican govern- 
ment have changed often, and bloody wars have 
been fought over the theories and practices of re- 
publican rule, the actual spirit of the central govern- 
ment has continued Spanish and almost feudal, 
even down to this day. 

The conditions of Indian community life have 
continued in Mexico with similar persistence. 
When the Spaniards came to Mexico in 1521 they 
found the Indians possessed of a communal organ- 
ization upheld by traditions which went back so far 
into prehistoric times that there was no memory 
of any other life. The basis of the political form 
of tribal organization was the common ownership 
of land with the parceling out of portions to the 
individuals who were able to work them, a sort of 
temporary tenancy continuing only for life. There 
were no land titles and no heritage. The natives 
lived in villages; they almost never had their homes 
on the land they worked. In theory, if any owner- 
ship existed, it was vested in the cacique, or petty 
chief, who in tiu-n owed feudal fealty to the rulers of 
his clan and nation. No individual enterprise ex- 
cept exploitation by the priests and caciques was 
possible, and no ambition for land o^vnership, for 
homesteads, or for self-betterment entered into 
Indian psychology. 

The Spaniards introduced the idea of property 
as it was known in Em-ope, but the communal 

153 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

system of the Aztecs gave them an opportunity, 
which they promptly took, of fastening a serfdom 
not unhke the feudal system on the natives. Great 
tracts of land and whole villages of Indians were 
distributed among the conquerors, and there grew 
up the anomaly of Spanish possessors of vast 
estates within which their Indian serfs held com- 
munal title to village lands. ^ 

The Indian communes and the haciendas,"^ on 
which the Spaniards built their feudal castles, were 
the basic centers of the community life of colonial 
Mexico. The growth away from both these firm 
traditions was slow, and even to-day their irrecon- 
cilable differences are the root of many of the coun- 
try's problems. The beginnings of the change to 
more modern systems were found early, however, 
in the appearance of a group of small private land- 
owners known in Mexico as rancheros. 

At first largely mestizos who tried to make their 
ranches into imitations of the feudal haciendas of 
their Spanish fathers, the development of the 
rancher type has been paralleled by the change of 
their httle farms to more democratic holdings, 
wherein the rancher was himself a working farmer, 
his peons real ''hands." 

The increase in small rural properties is a sig- 
nificant fact in the community growth of Mexico 
under Diaz. It seems to indicate an approach to 
European ideals of national development, and indeed 

1 See part ii, chap, x, pp. 317 ff. for fuller description of the 
land conditions of the time. 

^ Literally, an hacienda is a rural property of twenty thousand 
acres or more; a rancho, a private farm of smaller size. 

154 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

one of its most potent causes was the insistence of 
Diaz on a revision of land titles and the consequent 
breaking up of the communal properties in order 
that they might be developed by individual 
initiative. 

The Indian mind, however, has never been truly 
friendly to this modern development. There was 
much opposition to the breaking up of communal 
properties, and indeed the census of 1900 reported 
2,082 formally organized commimes still in exist- 
ence. The effective bribe of the later revolution- 
aries to the Indians was the promise not of farms, 
but of the restoration of communal properties, and 
undoubtedly there was a large increase in their 
number under Carranza — and a probable decrease 
in the number of the small individual properties 
which, under Diaz, marked the slow advance of 
modern community organization. 

This fact of Indian conservatism and reversion, 
demonstrated so clearly in the actual organization 
of land distribution, is of deep importance to an 
understanding of the nature of Mexican community 
life. There is yet another index in the industrial 
organization of the Mexican villages. Under the 
Aztec plan, every village was a center of some sort 
of production, usually a specialty, such as pottery, 
baskets, hats. The artisans who made them ac- 
cumulated their surplus and, when ready, themselves 
carried it to the market places of the towns, where 
they bartered for other products needed in their 
commune. From the very beginning there was 
barter of foodstuffs in the cities, but as a rule each 

155 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

village was supposed to be seK-supporting in this 
regard, and to this day the contribution of the 
Indian villages to the national food supply is ahnost 
nothing. Except for the farm communities around 
the great cities, such as Mexico, and for the haciendas 
which almost alone produce staples for the market, 
the country districts have practically no surplus 
food supply. 

The village life is expressive in very concrete 
form of the separation in the Indian's mind of his 
work and his true life. He works for an employer 
to obtain money to spend upon his pleasm-es and 
satisfactions, and he tills his httle milpa (a tract of 
land which is assigned him by the communistic vil- 
lage, or by his employer if he is on an hacienda) and 
raises there only enough for the needs of himself and 
his family. If he is bound to an hacienda he looks 
to his patron for support and living when his crops 
fail, but he seldom contributes anything voluntarily 
to the national food supply to which he looks for 
this charity in case of trouble. He lives in the 
village, preferring to walk a long distance to his 
work, and in the village life obtains such satisfac- 
tions as his simple nature craves. 

This village life of the rural Mexican might be 
compared with the farm villages of England and of 
France, but the farming villages of Em^ope are the 
result of a system of intensive land cultivation which 
makes communication between the farms or garden 
plots and the village very easy, while in Mexico, 
under the system of extensive cultivation, the 
Indian may have to go a long distance each day 

156 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

to and from his work. He lives in the village, not 
for economic reasons, but from his own personal 
preference, despite the tremendous loss of efficiency 
which this way of living entails. He may go to the 
mines, he may work on the railways, he may take 
employment in the little mills in his neighborhood, 
but he continues to hve in villages. If the village 
commons or little farms about can support him, 
well and good, but if not the aid of a paternal 
government must be invoked and the economic 
organization necessary for industrial development 
must arrive at the hands of political adaptation. 

Wrapped around -with this conservatism, this 
mass of tradition upon which the Indian habitually 
acts and which has been the same for probably 
2,000 years, the community life of Mexico is an 
unchanging background. The life of the farm vil- 
lages of 1,000 people approximates the fife of the 
City of Mexico with its 500,000. Half an hour's 
walk from the cathedral in Mexico City will bring 
one to a section of the capital where life follows the 
same regime as will be found in the most typical 
Indian village in the wilds of Chiapas. In the 
little patio which is surrounded by fifty dirty rooms 
in each of which a family of five to a dozen people 
lives, one will find women patting tortillas, grand- 
mothers weaving blankets, children cutting their 
teeth on sugar cane, men weaving baskets and mak- 
ing sandals, just as one will find them at Pichucalco, 
a thousand miles to the south. 

The life of the cities has its Spanish phases, but 

it is impossible to ignore the Indian influence in the 

157 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

life of all and particularly the smaller units of the 
great Mexican community. The business of the 
hacienda has largely to do with the petty problems 
of its Indian retainers, and the human element is 
many times more exacting there than in more 
modern lands. The cities, for all their many 
European aspects, are almost dominated by the 
desires and standards of the Indian, a fact that 
tourists — or old residents — realize best. Only in 
the larger phases of government do the white and 
mestizo codes take prominence. 

There are, indeed, these two codes. The Euro- 
pean white brought with him aristocracy and the 
responsibilities of aristocracy; the mestizo has 
turned these to bureaucracy and demagogy. The 
first revolution, as we have seen, was carried to 
success by the Creoles, who sought first to bring 
Ferdinand VII, whom Napoleon had dethroned in 
Spain, to rule a new kingdom in Mexico, then to 
set up a Creole emperor, Iturbide, and, a generation 
later, to bring Maximilian to a Mexican throne. 
The mestizo ideal was noisy '^ democracy" and was 
expressed in a lively imitation of the political codes 
of the American and French revolutions. Finally, 
after bitter struggles in which the conservative 
element sought to create at least a centralized 
republic, like that of France, the mestizo imitators 
of the American revolutionists finally imposed an 
imitation of the American Constitution, carving out 
states where none existed, and setting up a sham 
democracy which has been struggling between the 
bureaucrats and the demagogues through the eighty 

158 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

years which have followed. Mexico's eight hun- 
dred revolutions and her nearly ninety Presidents 
make the discussion of her political evolution a 
subject more related to history than to community 
life, for in Mexico politics is revolution and has 
been so since the beginning of her national history. 
There are no elections, and indeed never have been, 
the forms through which the government goes being 
intended not even for the deception of the public, 
but rather as blinds to screen succeeding dictator- 
ships from the eyes of a democratic world. 

The government problem of Mexico has seldom 
got beyond the primary question of pubhc order, 
for only under the white regimes of the colonial 
period and of Porfirio Diaz has even this been 
attained. Of the one hundred and ten years of 
Mexican independence only twenty can be called 
completely orderly, and those were of course the 
period of Diaz's most complete control. Taking 
the question of Mexico's government from this 
angle, her whole history resolves itself into a series 
of abortive failures, lightened only by the successes 
of the viceroys and the brilUant era of Diaz. 

In the maintenance of order the Indian has until 
now been a docile tool, wilUng (and as anxious as 
his mentality allows him to be) to lend himself to 
the works of peace, waiting for wise rulers to build 
him into the fabric of Mexican nationality. The 
whites have, as a rule, been of the landowning class, 
which is always conservative, so that the restless 
mestizos have been the great disturbing element, 
the great problem of government from the simple 

11 159 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

angle of the preservation of public order up to the 
more subtle questions of national development. 
Their refusal to lend themselves for long to the 
maintenance of any ordered government has ever 
been the destructive element in Mexican history, the 
chief deterrent in its path along the ways of peace 
toward the higher development of the nation. 

With the Indians as the inert element, it becomes 
evident that from the Spaniards to the fall of Diaz 
government in Mexico was not a problem that 
extended below the middle class. The Indian, the 
blind follower of leaders, was the weapon of all her 
revolutions, but he did not really become a po- 
litical problem until the tide of Indian resurgence 
was stirred up and encouraged to the danger point 
after Madero. Where public office, graft, and loot 
appear on the horizon of a man's social possibilities, 
there begins the problem of government in Mexico. 
It is upon that plane that government exists as this 
is written (1920), and there it seems likely to remain 
until again the white code which ruled in the days 
of the viceroys and in the time of Diaz is again 
called back to control. 

Both the Constitution of 1857 under which Diaz 
ruled, and that of 1917, which was the tool of Car- 
ranza, are the product of the mestizo politicians. 
Diaz maintained his control by ignoring many of 
the provisions of the instrument which gave him 
power, and Carranza was no more respectful to the 
1917 Constitution, which he allowed to be used for 
the spoliation of the country and the enrichment of 
his generals. 

160 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

Under both documents Mexico was provided 
with a theoretically representative, elective govern- 
ment. Under both, however, the President was 
able to arrange to succeed himself despite antire- 
election clauses; he has been able to dictate the 
individual make-up of both Houses of Congress, and 
to appoint, often without the cloak of elections, the 
governors of all the states. These in turn named 
the jefes politicos (under Diaz the executives of 
cantones comparable to American counties), and 
selected mayors, chiefs of pohce, and even the 
most minor ofl&cials. Under both, moreover, the 
courts have been completely subject to executive 
domination. 

This is the pohtical organization of Mexico in 
its simplicity. Even in actuahty it was httle more 
comphcated under Diaz, whose famous motto, 
*' Little pohtics and much government," hung high 
before the eyes of every Mexican official. 

The government of Mexican municipalities, be 
they Indian villages or properly constituted urban 
towns, is vested in a municipal president and a 
council with largely advisory powers. This muni- 
cipal organization controls the police and sanitary 
functions of the government and draws its authority 
from the chief of the canton, or county. He in 
turn is answerable to the governor, and thence to 
the central authorities. Taxes are collected by 
city and state authorities, save for the Federal 
imposts, which are gathered in the form of a sur- 
charge of stamps equaling a fixed percentage of the 
state and municipal taxes. 

161 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The state governments in Mexico are in control 
of the school systems and to a large extent of the 
broader policies in local affairs. Local self-govern- 
ment is largely a name, and yet the basic com- 
munistic idea persists in the regulation of social life 
through the municipalities and villages. The mu- 
nicipality, for instance, has charge of the music in 
the band stands, of the amusements which come to 
the one official theater, and of the streets, plazas, 
and market places where the people live. It is to 
this, perhaps, that the town spirit can be traced, 
for the town spirit of Mexico is a very real thing. 
In sections where the Indian system still endures 
and where the common lands have persisted, village 
spirit runs high, and there is always a boundary 
dispute with some neighboring village to keep the 
local patriotism fanned to flame. The tierra, or 
homeland, is the one spot dear above all others to the 
Mexican, and particularly to the Indian. He will 
travel all over Mexico and even to distant coun- 
tries, but he will return sometime, if he lives, to his 
tierra. 

In its provincial Indianism, the Mexican com- 
munity owes its nature very largely to the historic 
lack of good communication. The Aztecs had no 
beasts of burden, and human backs were the only 
carriers, so that, although Montezuma's civilization 
was far advanced in many ways, it had not yet 
reached the point of building adequate roads be- 
tween its cities. The Spaniards, who introduced 
horses and burros, also devoted much effort to the 
building of certain great highways across the coun- 

162 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

try, notably the stone-paved causeway leading up 
from the hot country at Vera Cruz to Mexico City 
on the plateau. They also built this road westward 
to Acapulco and Manzanillo, where the galleons 
from Manila brought the treasures of the Orient 
for transport overland and reshipment to Spain. 
But these roads to the westward were never com- 
parable with the great highway which was built to 
Vera Cruz. Some roads were extended northward 
and southward from the capital, but as a rule only 
footpaths marked the ways over which friars and 
explorers pushed the edges of civilization. 

After the revolution, the Mexicans neglected 
even the upkeep of the Spanish highways, and in 
the middle of the last century, when the question 
of railways began to be discussed, Mexican roads 
were a byword. Pack trains of burros and mules 
continued to be the chief means of transportation, 
and the more economical ox carts and mule-drawn 
vehicles could hardly penetrate beyond the imme- 
diate environs of the towns. 

The era of railway building had a tremendous in- 
fluence in linking the outlying districts to the na- 
tional capital, as well as in developing the resources 
of the country. Much of the provincialism gradu- 
ally disappeared, and where previously the Creoles 
and the upper-class mestizos had lived, in the in- 
terior cities and on their haciendas, an extremely 
narrow life, they were now able to keep in touch 
with the capital and with the world outside. The 
Indians and the peons also began to feel the change 
of outside contact, and they, too, began to develop 

163 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

a realization of national unity and interdependence 
which was unknown in earlier days. 

Meanwhile, however, the roads between villages 
and even those joining villages to the centers of 
population, have progressed but little. Climate 
here takes toll, for when a good road is built, the 
succeeding rainy season is almost sure to wash it 
away or to cut it into deep gullies. The typical 
Mexican road, even where it was once laid out for 
wheel traffic, is a broad space cut by ditches, over 
which the trains of mules, going single file, work 
back and forth to find the easiest trail. Around 
some of the cities there are automobile roads which 
were maintained during the Diaz time at consider- 
able expense, but which have now fallen into dis- 
repair and are so cut up in certain sections that 
even light motor cars seldom leave the cities except 
on vitally important trips. 

The homogeneity of Mexico, despite the business 
and social handicaps of poor communications, is a 
continual surprise, but the Spaniards, and even the 
adventurous mestizos who went into the interior, 
retained something vital which contributed, even 
in their isolation, to the development of an essen- 
tially Mexican type throughout the entire colony 
and nation. With the building of the railroads the 
results of intercoromunication, both in the shifting 
of the population and in the distribution of national 
ideas, were remarkable and encoirraging. It has 
shifted the population considerably throughout all 
of Mexico, and has to a certain extent broken up 

the idea of tierra, or home land, and had a definite, 

164 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

if somewhat limited, effect on the growth of the 
idea of patria, or fatherland. 

That this development had not gone so far as 
could have been hoped was demonstrated, however, 
in the last few years of the revolution. Each out- 
break, that of Madero in Chihuahua, of Carranza in 
Coahuila, of Obregon in Sonora, began in a single 
state and spread by state groups throughout the 
country, until it finally engulfed the central govern- 
ment. The inability of a Federal army to cover the 
country, owing to the still inadequate transportation 
facilities and the lack of good roads beyond the 
railways, has had much to do with the ease with 
which revolution spreads. An army of 200,000 
men would not be too great to police Mexico at 
any time of unrest, and such an army has never been 
available. Had the communications been adequate, 
a much smaller force might have kept the country 
united under any govermnent at any time. The 
success of the Diaz regune was attained in spite 
of the tremendous handicap of the lack of trans- 
portation, and was the result ahnost alone of the 
organizing genius of the dictator. 

The police system of Mexico had reached a 
certain efficiency under Diaz, whose small army 
was occupied largely in garrison service and parade, 
and little with police duty. Under Carranza, 
however, the presence of soldiers at some time or 
other in every section of Mexico has somewhat 
lowered the prestige of the local police, although 
in organization the police force has remained intact 
in most of the cities. In Mexico City the police 

165 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

have a sort of military organization and have always 
been headed by an army officer; similar arrange- 
ments prevail in other large cities, though the police 
force is supposedly under the control of the mayor 
or municipal president, who is answerable for its 
efficiency to the civil officials above him. Under 
Diaz there were, in addition, state constabularies 
in some sections, and over all Mexico the remark- 
able body of Federal police known as the rurales. 
These, while controlled by the central government, 
were, essentially peace officers, and in exercising 
their functions worked in conjunction with the 
local police authorities wherever such existed, and 
turned their prisoners over to the state courts 
except where their offenses were against the Federal 
government. The abolition of the rurales by the 
revolution has left the police work outside of the 
cities and incorporated villages entirely in the 
hands of the army, either the Federal soldiers or 
the state military constabulary, an arrangement 
marked by graft and inefficiency. 

The sanitation of Mexican communities, their 
water supply,^ and in general the inspection and 
maintenance of civilized standards of living, are 
all functions of government in Mexico, fulffiled to 
a degree proportionate almost directly to the 
standard maintained by the central government. 
Indeed, it is to the efficiency of the police function 
more than to any other single factor that the rela- 
tive improvement in living conditions under Diaz 

1 Sanitation and water supply are discussed in part ii, chap. ix. 
Crime and charities are discussed in part ii, chap. xii. 

166 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

is to be traced; and, inversely, in the inefficiency 
of the police organization under the revolutions 
are to be found the chief causes of the laxity and 
consequent suffering in these periods. The ma- 
jority of Mexicans find little use for the foibles of 
modern civilization unless forced upon them by 
their rulers. 

The improvement of the water supply m Mexican 
towns has made it possible for some attempt to be 
made at modern fire fighting. Under the old 
systems the municipalities made practically no 
provision for combating fires and even in some of 
the largest towns there were not even volunteer 
departments, this function being left to the police 
and the crowd. Up to ten years ago the fire ap- 
paratus of Mexico City was operated by hand, but 
the capital and some other of the chief centers now 
have modern fire apparatus more or less adapted 
to the needs of the community. In this connection 
it must be remembered that there are very few 
buildings over two stories high except in Mexico 
City, and of course excepting the churches, which 
are built almost entirely of masonry. 

While the streets in all the large cities are lighted 
by electricity, there is very little official street 
cleaning, although the business thoroughfares of 
the leading cities are brushed up irregularly by a 
small force using rush brooms and making some 
attempt at the disposal of the refuse. In some 
places there is city garbage collection, but as a rule 
the garbage is burned by the housekeeper. There is 
comparatively little use of fuel for heating; and 

167 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cooking is usually done with charcoal, so that there 
is little need of ash removal. Residents or property 
owners in Mexican cities are required to keep the 
streets fronting on their property cleaned, and in 
Mexico City, for instance, the resident in the abut- 
ting property is required to sweep and sprinkle the 
streets, the latter twice a day during the dry season. 
The pohceman on patrol sees to the enforcement of 
this regulation. 

As a general rule the Mexican community is a 
reflection of the attitude of the Mexican toward 
.life in general. It seems to function successfully 
only under eternal vigilance — one reason why the 
Federal government has usually been so much more 
successful in the capital and in the territories than 
have the local governments in the states. The 
Mexican has a wholesome respect for authority, 
bred in him from the long years of Spanish rule, and 
generally he is told what is expected of him, and, if 
conscious of the proximity of a policeman, will obey 
regulations religiously. 

The education of the masses to a desire for civic 
virtues has always been difficult, because, as a rule, 
the peon has no consciousness of his own respon- 
sibility in the creation or destruction of the things 
that make his town or village admirable. The de- 
tached attitude of the Indian and even of the better- 
class Mexican toward the beautiful public buildings 
of Mexico City and toward the festivals which are 
organized for his entertainment, cannot but impress 
even the most casual observer. The Mexican looks 
to something outside himself to provide the things 

168 



THE COMMUNITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT 

which are desirable, and has never yet been edu- 
cated to a realization that he himself has any real 
part in their creation. The problem of the Mexican 
community is in the ultimate a problem of Mexican 
education just as completely as the problem of the 
increase in his wants and the improvement in his 
living conditions resolves itself in the end into the 
need for the creation of a definite appreciation for 
them in his own mind. 



Ill 

RELIGION 

IN the centuries-long assault upon the embattled 
walls of Indian race and tradition, the Spaniards 
were uniformly successful in only one field — that of 
religion. Government there was, but in govern- 
ment we have watched the disintegrating forces of 
mestizo and Indian crudities coming more and more 
to the surface. Racial amalgamation there was, 
but again to-day shows us the steady disappearance 
of white blood, as of white rule. In intellectual 
control, be it culture in its broadest sense or in 
education, we see a struggle that still continues, 
with Indian apathy still triumphant in the nation's 
colossal illiteracy. 

But in religion the Cross is supreme, supported 
alike by the faith of white or mestizo Catholic and 
Protestant and by the superstition and inbred 
tradition of the Indian. The whiter Mexicans may 
be Christian only in name (or only in fact and not 
in name), the Indian may be consistently pagan in 
his religious processes; but, white or red, it is 
Christianity and the saints of the Church which fill 
the human soul-needs of Mexico and furnish all the 

terms and languages of native faith. For the 

170 



RELIGION 

Mexicans are deeply and inherently religious, and 
from the very beginning the Roman Catholic 
Church bent itself to meet the^native conditions 
and thus to conquer them, and in later days Catholic 
and Protestant have fastened upon the country the 
moral standards which, whatever their failures, are 
essentially Christian. 

It was no mean thing to uproot the millenniums of 
ancient Mexican paganism in three brief centuries 
of Christian domination, and in the final analysis 
the formal and largely actual Christianization of 
Mexico is a work of vast credit to the miUtant mis- 
sionary work of Rome. Whatever else may be said 
of the Catholic Church in Mexico, neither its re- 
sponsibility for building a Christian basis there nor 
the completeness of its control can be questioned. 
Beginning with the 6,000,000 baptisms in the six- 
teen years immediately following the conquest (how- 
ever many may have been the duplications of the 
rite) and continuing to this day, when virtually 
every infant born in Mexico is baptized by a priest, 
there has been no time, even in the height of the 
political warfare which waged around the Church, 
when the overwhelming majority of Mexicans have 
not been baptized Catholics. 

According to the Mexican census of 1910, almost 
the entire religious population of 15,115,343 is ac- 
counted for as Catholic, only 82,167 professing 
other creeds, as follows: 15,033,176 Catholics, 
68,839 Protestants, 630 Greek CathoHcs, 12,698 
of non-Christian faiths, 20,015 '^ unknown," and 

25,011 with "no religious belief." 

171 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The data of the Cathohc Church should of course 
give the basic figures. Even this, however, is in- 
complete and inaccurate. The Cathohc Directory ^ 
gives data by dioceses, and shows a total of Mexican 
"Cathohc population" of 13,694,507, most of the 
diocesan populations being given in round thou- 
sands, and others showing astonishing variations, 
due perhaps to typographical errors, between the 
various years. 

The Catholic Church in Mexico is divided into 
eight provinces, with eight archdioceses, twenty- 
two dioceses, and the vicarate apostolic of Lower 
California. The census of 1910 reports 4,405 
"Cathohc priests," the Catholic Directory showing 
4,177 secular priests, 761 priests of religious orders, 
and 357 brothers, the priesthood for two small 
dioceses (Colima and Tabasco) being missing, and 
the number of priests belonging to religious orders 
probably being inaccurate, especially in those 
dioceses where the Reform Laws, which prohibit 
many of the orders, are rigidly enforced. Only 
1,881 sisters and nuns and twelve additional 
"sisterhoods" whose membership is not given are 
reported in the Directory, the maintenance of 
religious orders for women, except for a very 
limited number, being illegal in Mexico. 



1 Mons. Francis J. Kelley, head of the Catholic Church Extension 
Society and the chief American authority on Mexican Cathohcism, 
takes this as the most rehable data obtainable, either in Mexico 
or the United States. In arriving at the figures given, both the 
1910 and 1919 Directories had to be used, as the former, which 
was for the census year which we are using, did not have data 
for all the dioceses. 

17g 



RELIGION 

Twenty-nine seminaries for education for priest- 
hood are noted in the CathoUc Directory, but the 
number of schools and colleges is inaccurate, as 
some diocesan reports merely stated that ''each 
parish has parochial schools" and many mentioned 
none. On this point there are no exact figures ob- 
tainable anywhere, owing to the combination of 
Mexican official inaccuracies and the fact that the 
Cathohc Church is chary in its announcements, as 
its schools have always been a point of attack, 
though a Mexican government brochure published 
in 1901 said there were 32,000. There are certainly 
several thousand schools, caring, it is said, for more 
than 300,000 pupils.^ 

The Catholic Directory fists 9,325 churches and 
chapels, the number, of course, including many 
places where services are held only occasionally, and 
many dioceses give only roimd numbers. The in- 
complete records of the various dioceses published 
by the same authority list 190 asylums, hospitals, 
and other charitable institutions, probably far 
below the actual numbers. 

Of these figures the most interesting are those 
for the number of priests in Mexico, which is at the 
rate of one for every 3,000 Cathofics. In 1810, the 
period of greatest Church control in Mexico, there 
were 7,341 priests (of whom 3,112 belonged to the 



^Testimony of Monsignor Kelley before the United States 
Senate Sub-Committee Investigating Mexican Aifairs, p. 2680 
of the hearings, May 1, 1920, the CathoUc Directory of 1919 
giving the number of schools in the archdiocese of Mexico as 232, 
and attendance, 50,000. 

173 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

orders devoted to teaching and 'charity) and 2,098 
sisters, most of them teachers, the total popu- 
lation in that year, all officially Catholic, being 
6,122,354, so that the proportion of Catholic clergy 

DISTRIBUTION AND SIZE OF CATHOLIC CHURCH ORGANIZATION 



Diocese 



Arch, of Mexico 

Chilapa 

Cuernavaca 

Tulancingo 

Vera Cruz 

Lower California .... 

Arch, of Piiebla 

Arch, of Michoacan. . 

Queretaro 

Leon 

Zamora 

Arch, of Guadalajara, 



Aguas Calientes. 

Colima 

Tepic 

Zaoatecas 

Arch, of Oaxaca. 



Chiapas. 



Tehuantepec 

Arch, of Yucatan. 

Campeche 

Tabasco 

Arch, of Durango. 



Chihuahua 

Sinaloa 

Sonora 

Arch, of Linares. 
San Luis Potosi. 



Saltillo 

Tamaulipas . 



Total . 



COfli 



620 

94 

46 

120 

138 

6 

400 

320 

92 

243 

225 

650 

60 



98 
129 
206 

62 

33 

94 
16 



111 

32 
40 
40 
80 
132 

40 
50 



4,177 



PWtf 



218 



15 
38 

200 
80 
20 
39 

55 



30 



17 



761 



Sisters 



1,497 



100 
6 sister- 
hoods 
5 sister- 
hoods 

"96 
10 

1 sister- 
hood 



45 
97 



1,881 and 

12 sister- 

hoods 

174 



Catholic 
Schools 



232 

io 

18 

13 

1 

300 

130 
11 
97 

156 

All 
Parishes 
30 



53 

68 



31 

37 

3 

2 

12 



20 

4 

14 

All 

Parishes 



1,242 



29 



<a (3 

^ 



11 
190 



3 cS 
00 



1,000 

'.366 

428 
300 
25 
2,000 
350 
210 
503 
158 
800 

100 

"65 
281 
999 

500 

180 

300 

40 

250 

64 
70 
54 
75 
150 

41 
82 



9,325 



J3 3 



1,8.39,250 
361,239 
150,000 
250,000 
500,000 
43,104 

1,200,000 

1,000,000 
279,414 
800,000 
325,000 

1,200,000 

200,000 
72,500 
180,000 
525,000 
920,000 

270,000 

174,000 
300,000 
80,000 
100,000 
350,000 

240,000 
250,000 
130,000 
357,000 
620,000 

163,000 
316,000 



13,694,507 



RELIGION 

to the population was at that tune one to 834. 
In the United States, with a CathoUc population 
in 1917 of 15,742,262, there are 20,287 priests, 
or one to every 776 Cathohcs. The 42,044,374 
church members of all denominations in the United 
States (1917) are served by 191,722 clergymen of 
all denominations, or one to every 153 church 
members. 1 

The list on the preceding page, of the Mexican 
dioceses, with the data from the 1910 and 1919 
Catholic Directories, correlated and combined, gives 
some idea of the distribution and size of the Church 
organization in Mexico. 

The data on the churches and missions of the 
Protestant churches in Mexico are available in more 
detail. In 1910 there were 19 American, Canadian, 
and British societies maintaining missionary or- 
ganizations in Mexico, with 87 ordained mission- 
aries, 12 physicians, 30 lay missionaries and phy- 
sicians, and 167 women missionary workers, a total 
of 294 foreigners (including 6 British), and 130 
ordained Mexican missionaries. There were 331 
church organizations and 25,046 baptized Protestant 
Mexicans, the total number of ''adherents" of the 
Protestant churches, baptized and unbaptized, of 
all ages, being 92,156. 

The following table gives the details of these 
missionary organizations : - 



^ Mexican data from Navarro y Noriega; American from United 
States Bureau of the Census. Both quoted by Monsignor Kelley, 
loc. cit. p. 2671. 

2 World Atlas of Foreign Missions (New York, 1911). 
12 175 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



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176 



RELIGION 

The number of members of the Orthodox Greek 
Church was 630 in 1910, and of the 12,698 adher- 
ents of non-Christian rehgions the official clas- 
sification specified the following: Mohammedans, 
602, Buddhists, 6,237, Jews, 254, and others, 
5,605. 

The "free-thinkers," atheists, etc., are included 
in those of "no religious belief," the census num- 
bering them at 25,011, though the total is probably 
much higher, including most of the 20,015 of 
"unknown" faith. Mexico has since Juarez been 
theoretically a country without religion, and the 
name of Deity is carefully omitted from all public 
documents. This had become something of a 
fetish under Diaz, and it is said that the dictator 
never pronounced the word "God" in any public 
place, and when Elihu Root visited Mexico officially 
as Secretary of State of the United States his al- 
lusion to the bounty of Deity in a speech before the 
Mexican Congress was the subject of comment. 
This atheistic spirit manifested itself with great 
violence during the Carranza revolution, the story 
of whose persecutions of priests and mms, coupled 
with the pillaging of the churches and the unmen- 
tionable desecrations of holy relics, vestments, etc., 
is one of the ugliest pages of Mexican history.^ 
During this period of outrages (1914-16) against 
the Catholics, the Protestant missions were left 
almost untouched and were, on the other hand. 



1 Cf . Theodore Roosevelt, Fear God and Take Your Own Part, 
p. 231, ff. (New York, 1916), and Francis J. Kelley, The Book of 
the Bed and Yellow (Chicago, 1916). 

177 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

specifically encouraged by Carranza, as they had 
been under Diaz. 

This brings us to the much-discussed question of 
the nature of the religious population of Mexico. 
The Protestant missionary bodies have long justi- 
fied their work on the ground that, although osten- 
sibly Christian, the majority of the Catholics of the 
country are in reality little better than pagan, owing 
to the domination of forms and rituals and to the 
superstitions with which the churchly ceremony is 
interpreted by the Indians. There are not lacking 
in Mexico native critics of the Church who say 
much the same thing. One of these ^ divides the 
Church population into three divisions, which he 
calls Pagan Catholics, Utilitarian Catholics, and 
True Catholics. All are baptized, married (if at all), 
and buried by the Church, but the Pagan Catholics 
perform all sorts of strange rites and find their 
chief bond to the Church in this satisfaction of their 
superstitions. While they profess full faith in 
Christianity, they also perform rituals for the preser- 
vation of their crops from drought and wild animals; 
they exorcise demons during illness and find their 
sweetest revenge against their enemies in the use 
of charms and philters. This commentator points 
out what Protestant missionaries have also claimed, 
that images of the saints in Mexican churches are 
worshiped with much the same devotion as would 
be given idols, and that the religious festivals are 
often marked by pagan dances and exotic cere- 
monies on the part of the Indians. The Pagan 

1 Maniel Gamio, Forjando Patria, p. 157, 

17s 



RELIGION 

Catholics are indeed mostly Indian, and it may be 
that the approximation of many of the special 
Mexican saints to the Aztec gods has had much to 
do with the exceeding importance given to these 
saints in Mexican religion. Our Lady of the 
Rains, much esteemed by the simple natives of the 
farming communities, seems undoubtedly related 
to the important Aztec Goddess of Water, and her 
miracles are said to approximate those attributed 
to the ancient deity. Many of the important 
shrines of the Mexican Church are in spots formerly 
sacred to Aztec gods and that of the patron saint of 
Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is said to have 
once been a holy place of an Aztec goddess. In 
fairness to the Cathohc Church, however, it must 
be said that the Indians are not allowed to dwell 
on these alleged correspondences, and many of the 
miracles attributed to the Virgin of Guadalupe are 
absolutely authenticated, and recognized by the 
Vatican. The Church has always been lenient 
with native superstitions, and each year at the 
Church of St. Anthony the Abbot, in the heart of 
one of the poorer sections of Mexico City, a priest 
blesses a motley crowd of burros and horses, cows 
and goats, pet dogs, cats and parrots, while in some 
of the country churches the priests go so far as to 
bless sackfuls of ants, worms, etc., so that these 
pests, having become "Christians," may mix with 
their fellows in the fields and induce them to leave 
the afflicted farmer in peace.^ 

^ This last is upon the authority of a former Spanish priest, now 
a Protestant. Interview No. 433, Doheny Foundation Files. 

179 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The number of these so-called Pagan Catholics is 
undoubtedly very great, but so is the number of 
true, deeply religious Catholics, and also of those 
who profess the prevailing religion because of the 
social pressure upon them — the so-called Utilitarian 
CathoUcs. 

It is obvious that many of the factors which de- 
termine the nature of the religious population, 
genuine and "utilitarian" as well as "pagan," 
antedate Catholicism. The Aztec empire was a 
complete theocracy, wherein the priests ruled not 
only in religion and morals, but in government and 
in war. The priesthood dictated the policies 
toward other tribes, and their demand for human 
sacrifices was one of the chief causes of the devastat- 
ing wars which marked Mexican history previous to 
the conquest. An infinitude of gods, a vast number 
of temples, and a priesthood which included most 
of the ruling class in one form or another were its 
chief characteristics. 

The Spaniards who overthrew them were what 
would be called to-day fanatically religious. Only 
a few generations earlier Spain had won the last of 
the wars which had been waged for centuries against 
the Moslems, and religious fervor ran high in the 
Spanish court. With Cortez came priests, and in 
the first ships which followed him came friars and 
the Jesuits. Conversion of the Indians of Mexico 
was one of the chief objects of the conquest, and 
the mission priest and the explorer in search of gold 
went side by side into the distant wilderness. The 

ndi£ 

180 



RELIGION 

incomplete at the beginning, but during the cen- 
turies that followed a more thorough inculcation of 
Christian doctrine went on. This was found not 
only in the populous centers, but also in the vast 
outlying sections where the friars established the 
missions. 

These wonderful centers of religious proselytizing, 
civilizing industry, and political control were estab- 
lished not only along all the frontier from Saint 
Augustine, Florida, to San Francisco, California 
(where their remains still delight lovers of romance 
and beauty), but throughout the interior of what is 
still Mexico. A true and beautiful rehgious zeal 
animated the friars and later the mission priests, 
and history holds no record of devotion, self- 
sacrifice, or martyrdom that cannot be dupUcated in 
the stories of these great missionaries. 

The history of the missions is epitomic of the 
whole attitude of the colonial Church toward the 
natives, an attitude which has marked the life and 
psychology of the Indian so deeply that neither 
subsequent abuses nor broken faiths nor anti- 
Church revolutions and propaganda have been 
able to eradicate its influence. Throughout the 
interior of Mexico, and extending far into the 
American Southwest, the friars, with but one^ or 
two soldiers for guards and messengers, gathered 
the Indians into villages about the missions, and 
through wearing years impressed upon them a 
religious and civic discipline which extended to the 
most intimate details of their private, industrial, 

and community life. 

181 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The missions, dramatic as their story is, were but 
a part of the work of the colonial Church. From 
the very beginning, it was only the priests and 
nuns who were willing to devote themselves to the 
education of the Indians, and to them alone (for 
hardly anyone else has ever touched the problem) 
is due most of such civilization as has been gained 
and such implantation of Christianity as they have 
even to-day. Moreover, all the schools of the 
colonial period, including the great colleges and 
asylums which still exist, were largely church foun- 
dations, and not least of all is the vast material 
monument of 9,000 churches, virtually all of which 
were built in the colonial days. 

Much criticism there is and much is deserved, 
but no other people and no other cult has so trans- 
formed and beautified a land as the Spaniards and 
their Church transformed and beautified Mexico 
in the three centuries which ended in 1823. Spain 
gave Mexico a government and a language; the 
Church gave her religion, morals, and such art as 
now exists. Much might have been done that has 
not been done, and a field so vast and so sordid that 
it sickens the observer awaits correction and 
development. The Church alone dared face the 
problem for many centiu-ies. On the broad shoul- 
ders of Diaz it rested like a cross; through Mexico's 
periods of revolution and distress and struggles for 
personal aggrandizement it has lain inert and sodden 
upon all her governments. Here and there a 
corner has been lifted by a Protestant missionary, 
by a handful of self-sacrificing educators, or by a 

182 



RELIGION 

puny idealist like Madero, but taken all in all only 
the Roman Church has sought to lift the whole 
mass, or has so far achieved any broad success in 
moral and perhaps even in educational uplift. 

During the colonial period there was ahnost no 
distinction between Church and state in the affairs 
of government. The crown enjoyed all the rev- 
enues which the Church collected in Mexico, the 
Holy See's only requirement being that the mis- 
sionary work and worship be maintained, churches 
built, convents and schools established. The bishops 
were practically chosen by the king of Spain, and 
in reality the Church was part of the colonial ad- 
ministration, paying its returns after the main- 
tenance of its functions to the government in 
Madrid, a princely gift from the Holy See to the 
throne of Spain. In this arrangement, however, 
were the roots of the troubles which later grew out 
of the relationship of the Church and state in 
Mexico. These troubles had two phases, one the 
wealth which the Church kept in Mexico, the other 
the question which the independence of Mexico 
brought to the fore, whether the rich eccle- 
siastical revenues belonged to the Church or to the 
new government. Both these issues brought the 
Church into pohtics, the first because the power 
which this wealth gave the Church over the ruling, 
landowning class tempted the clergy to meddle in 
government affairs, and the second because it made 
Church control one of the burning questions of 
pohtical readjustment during the early revolutions. 

The wealth of the Church was the first element to 

183 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cause trouble, and that began before the inde- 
pendence. From the earUest times, the Church in 
Mexico had been ahnost the only banker of the 
country and lent vast sums to the landowners on 
generous terms at an interest rate of 5 per cent — 
one excellent way of keeping from paying unneces- 
sarily large amounts to the king (another way being 
the building of noble churches and great institu- 
tions). In 1804 Charles IV of Spain, looking about 
for ready cash, ordered the Mexican Church to 
collect and pay the crown, forthwith, the P44,- 
500,000 which it had loaned to the landowners, an 
order which could not be obeyed and which was 
later revoked, though P10,000,000i of the ''Pious 
fund" was taken. But the fear of the ruin of their 
farms and the country had stirred the Creoles against 
Spain, and to this royal edict may be traced not a 
little of the ultimate willingness of the native white 
aristocracy definitely to throw off Spanish rule. 
But in that order there lurked yet other difficulties, 
tied up with the fiscal question of the Church's 
revenues after the revolution. 

After independence from Spain was finally accom- 
plished the country was cleaved on the question of 
the division of the spoils. The Conservatives 
(mostly Creoles) were the champions of the Church 
and indeed the chief beneficiaries of its favors, and 
the Church now claimed as its right the capital 



^ The Mexican peso will be designated by P. Previous to the 
demonitization of silver in the United States the $ and P were 
of equal value. The peso is now of gold value, equivalent to 
fifty cents, or two shillings. 

184 



RELIGION 

and all the surplus revenues which it had formerly 
given to the Spanish king. The Liberals (the 
majority oi whom were mestizos) held that the 
new government, as the inheritor of all the other 
perquisites of the Spanish crown in Mexico, should 
also enjoy the surplus revenues of the Church. 
The issue was clear cut and the Church entered 
definitely into politics. 

As early as 1833 the question of the government 
taking over the wealth of the Church, first officially 
suggested by Charles IV in 1804, was brought up 
again, the proposal being for the nation, assuming 
the support of religion, to take over the Church 
lands and subdivide them into small properties 
which should be sold on long terms with 5 per cent 
interest, the returns to be used to pay the pubhc 
debt and ''maintain worship in a manner more 
adequate to the needs of the people."^ This was 
finked with other anticlerical plans, and was op- 
posed by the clergy and the Conservatives, and the 
government of Gomez Farias, which had proposed 
it, was overthrown. 

The issue of Church property was kept alive, 
however, and the Church revenues were reduced by 
forced loans and heavy taxes. In 1856 the remain- 
ing capital of the Pious or charitable fund was 
taken on the pretext of putting it into circulation, 
and by succeeding laws from 1859 to 1861 all the 
Church's property was finally wrested from it and 
sold. But there was none of the division of the 



1 Jose Maria Luis Mora, Obras Sueltas I, quoted by T. Esquivel 
Obregon, op. cit., p. 161. 

185 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

land or the maintenance of the old loan system 
which had been proposed in the plan of Gomez 
Farias; on the contrary, the Chm-ch loans were 
immediately called in, forcing great tracts on to the 
market and resulting in a new concentration of the 
land in the hands of the wealthy. 

This, in essence, is the basis of the political 
activity of the Church in Mexico, an activity more 
economic than political, and least of all touching 
upon the rehgion and morals of the people. All the 
later appearances of the Chm-ch in politics, from the 
Empire of Maximilian to to-day, have their genesis 
in these old politico-economic difficulties, and in no 
sense in religious questions. 

Through all its kaleidoscopic troubles, however, 
the Church has not been overthrown. During the 
earlier revolutionary period, from 1810 to 1876, the 
churches, convents, and monasteries were sacked 
much as they were sacked during the revolutions of 
1910 to 1920. In 1857 the Mexican Church was 
stripped of its properties, the church buildings and 
adjoining structures being ''loaned" by the govern- 
ment for rehgious purposes, but, save politically and 
economically, the Church was little affected. In 
1917, under the Carranza regime, the church build- 
ings themselves were actually taken and the final 
dissolution of the property-holding right of the 
Church, even by subterfuge, was apparently 
achieved. During the time of Diaz there had been 
some little return of convents and church schools, 
but these, under the Constitution of 1917, were 
again wiped out as in 1857. 

186 



RELIGION 

There had been some apparent relaxation of the 
grip of Diaz on the Church, particularly in the 
matter of schools, but such leniency was usually 
balanced, as, for instance, in 1906, when the Diaz 
government prohibited the long-accustomed open- 
air service in the cemeteries, a ruling that gave 
ample warning that there was no real loosening of 
the govermnent domination of religion. 

The Carranza era in Mexico, despite its violences, 
had little of the firmness which characterized the 
age of Diaz. The recovery of the Chmrch from its 
persecutions was astonishing, and could be indica- 
tive of nothing but a lack of real foundation in 
public approval of the anti-Church features of the 
campaigns. In the last two years of Carranza's 
rule, 1918-20, the bishops and many of the priests 
returned to Mexico and resumed their work. 
Some came under sufferance from the goverimient 
and some entered Mexico in disguise, and at the 
fall of Carranza in 1920 practically all of the 
churches had been reopened. 

Even if the Chiu-ch has not been permanently 
damaged, however, great harm has been done to the 
moral tone of Mexican life by the continued battles 
over religion. The Laws of Reform, while they had 
a most definite effect on the political power of the 
Church, also brought in a controversy which, 
waging to this day, has steadily undermined the 
morals of the people. This is the quarrel over the 
rite of marriage, which, previous to 1859, was 
solely a religious sacrament. The Laws of Reform 
made it a civil contract, and the Church in its po- 

187 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

litical zeal carried its battle with the anticlerical 
forces of Mexico to the very altar of the Mexican 
home. By refusing to recognize the civil ceremony 
and by continuing to make the religious service an 
expense to the Indian, the forming of illicit relations 
became a commonplace, until it is probably true 
to-day that, in the lower classes at least, marriage, 
whether civil or religious, has practically no sig- 
nificance. By adopting this attitude the Church 
undoubtedly weakened the moral tone of its people 
and gained- little except a cause for complaint 
against the government. 

Another serious blow to Mexican moral standards 
that resulted from the Wars of Reform, and in lesser 
degree from the Madero-Carranza revolution, was 
the effect on the priesthood. During the colonial 
regime the policy of Spain toward the Indians (re- 
garding them as minors) limited the clergy to 
whites and mestizos. The exile of the Spaniards 
after 1823 not only took away thousands of able 
Spanish priests, but it also drew many of the edu- 
cated Creoles and mestizos in the priesthood to 
vacated opportunities in the learned professions, 
and many, influenced by Liberal opinion, no doubt, 
left the Church to become lawyers, doctors, etc. 
The Laws of Reform closed the seminaries, and 
thus limited the opportunities for replacing these 
losses with Mexicans, and the Church was forced 
to depend for its hierarchy and for its best workers 
largely upon foreigners, from France, Italy, and 
later again from Spain. As a result, the Mexican 
priesthood has long been composed of a mass of 

188 



RELIGION 

inadequately educated native curas, with a thin 
veneer of often disinterested foreigners and a few 
able Mexicans educated abroad. Moreover, in pro- 
portion to the great work to be done and indeed in 
proportion to the immense plant of church buildings 
and their appurtenances at the Church's disposal, 
the number of priests in the field has been astonish- 
ingly low. The twenty-nine seminaries in Mexico 
in 1910 were all relatively new, but were doing 
much both to correct the shortage of priests and 
to raise the low standard of the mass of the clergy. 
The relatively limited number of the Catholic 
clergy and the low qualifications of many of the 
priests are, however, at once the cause of and the 
excuse for the Protestant missionary work in 
Mexico. The government encouragement which 
the Protestants have had from the first came from 
two sources, one the realization of the vastness of 
Mexico's need for ministry, and the other the 
political aspect, which undoubtedly influenced Diaz, 
and to a far greater extent Carranza, to welcome and 
to nurture this new means of control of the power 
of the Catholic Church. This political factor is no 
less distasteful to Protestants than it is to Catholics, 
and under Diaz the former took no part whatever 
even in such politics as there were. During the 
revolutionary period there was some appearance of 
change, but such support as was given to Carranza 
by the Protestants was individual, many being 
active in the armies and not a few native Protestant 
ministers achieving political prominence, tem- 
porarily giving up their church rank, in compliance 

189 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

with the law. The foreign missionaries generally 
held aloof, although anaong the warmest defenders 
in the United States of the ill-starred Carranza 
regime were returned American missionaries from 
Mexico. 

The object of the Protestant missions in Mexico 
has never been very clear to the Mexican mind, 
the idea of many being that the Catholic Church 
should have been allowed to continue its work 
without the definite opposition to its teachings 
which it is generally conceded that the Protestant 
missions promulgate. The contention of the 
Protestants, however, has always been that there 
is just as much reason for them to carry on their 
work among the Mexicans as for them to send 
home missionaries into the western part of the 
United States, and the repeated assertion that the 
majority of the Catholics of Mexico are still essen- 
tially pagan gives support to their attutide. There 
was bitter opposition, and some bloodshed, in the 
early periods of the missionary work, and even to 
this day the Protestants are sometimes regarded as 
emissaries of the American government looking 
toward the ultimate annexation of the country. 
The confusion of religion with politics in the 
Mexican mind has affected this attitude toward the 
Protestants very considerably, and the fact that 
most of the Protestant converts in Mexico supported 
Madero, and that Carranza, after he came to power, 
was extremely favorable to the Protestant churches, 
has apparently given new ground for this suspicion. 
The Protestants were undoubtedly used very 

190 



RELIGION 

studiedly by Carranza to relieve himself as far as 
was convenient from the stigma of being anti- 
religious in his opposition to the Catholics, and the 
Protestant work was greatly benefited by his im- 
plied support and by the prominence he gave its 
adherents in the revolutionary councils. This is 
the chief basis for the many charges on the part of 
Mexicans regarding the '^ pernicious activities of 
Mexican Protestant clergymen." 

The Reform in Mexico was achieved without any 
substitution of Protestantism for Catholicism, and 
it was not until 1870 that the first Protestant 
missionary board (the American Baptist Home 
Mission Society) officially began its work in Mexico. 
This was not the first work done by individual 
Protestant missionaries, however. When General 
Scott marched from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in 
1847 his army was accompanied by an agent of the 
American Bible Society, who distributed several 
thousand copies of the Bible in Spanish between 
Vera Cruz and Mexico City. He retired with the 
army, and the only missionaries who entered Mexico 
before the Reform were a few travelers from Texas, 
among them a woman. Miss Matilda Rankin, who 
held services in Monterrey in the 'fifties. In 1862 
a Baptist missionary did some individual work in 
Mexico, to be followed, eight years later, by his 
Church organization. Between 1870 and 1880 
eight missionary organizations of the United States 
began the work which they have continued since. 

There were in 1910 nineteen missionary organiza- 
tions with stations in Mexico. The official figures 
13 191 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

on the activities of the Protestant churches in 
Mexico given in the table tell only a part, of the 
broad work attempted and accomphshed. Though 
the few hundred Protestant workers (one foreigner 
or native to each 20,000 of the population) cannot, 
of course, fill the gaps, they have, for more than 
forty years, been diligent workers in their many 
fields — churches and Sunday schools, hospitals and 
asylums. For about fifteen years they have been 
operating efficient schools in their chief centers and 
have presented a high scholastic standard both in 
their normal and seminary courses and in their 
primary schools. Although under the antire- 
ligious laws of Carranza the Protestant schools, like 
the Catholic, were closed, not a little of the criticism 
of the Mexican Protestant clergymen by anti- 
Carranzista Mexicans was based on the alleged 
dommation of government education by former 
Protestant school-teachers who were said to have 
been placed in the schools by former Protestant 
clergymen who were influential in educational 
affairs under Carranza. 

The evangelical work of the Protestant mission- 
aries has been conducted on a high spiritual plane, 
and has often been an effective leaven in the 
Mexican community. Always the unconunon 
standard (for Mexico) of legal marriage for all 
'^ wedded" converts has been insisted upon before 
baptism, and conversion carries with it a full ac- 
ceptance of the tenets to which the churches hold 
their members at home. This condition has had 
not a little to do with the limitation of their mem- 

192 



RELIGION 

bership, but it has doubtless also resulted in much 
more thorough conversions. 

Drawing their converts, as they often do, from 
people who are essentially religious, the Protestants 
have encountered two difficulties which at first 
may not be apparent. One is the deep resentment 
of the Cathohcs, for the most conscientious Mexican 
Protestants are likely to be men and women, for- 
merly good Catholics, who, because of their very 
sincerity, had come to feel limitations and deficien- 
cies in the Catholic Church. The other is the 
social ostracism which sometimes almost approaches 
spiritual martyrdom in the separation of Protestant 
converts from their families and friends. These 
conditions have made many unique problems for 
the missionaries, and indeed the whole work in 
Mexico has to be carried on on a plane different 
both from the work among the heathen and from 
home missions in the United States. To this field 
the missionaries have adapted themselves, and 
they are to-day tilling it diligently, while they con- 
tinue also to develop their greater opportunities of 
reaching the thousands of Mexicans who have 
never been touched by such work as the Catholic 
priests have been able to do. 

The present status of Protestant work in Mexico 
is not so much advanced beyond the place held in 
1910 as it should be under the undoubted advan- 
tages it had in Mexico under Carranza. This is 
due, however, largely to the shrinkage in missionary 
funds during the period of the Great War, when 
effective work might have made very great gains in 

193 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Mexico had not the call of Europe and the Near 
East been more urgent. In organization, however, 
the work has been greatly faciUtated by the zoning 
of the country and its division among the evan- 
gelical Churches. The missionary organizations 
formerly worked independently, and there was much 
concentration in such centers as Mexico City and 
Monterrey, while other equally fertile fields were 
almost neglected. The organization of the Com- 
mittee on Co-operation in Latin-America has now 
divided the country up into sections, in each of 
which one or two Protestant churches work alone, 
only the Southern Baptists being outside this ar- 
rangement. Supplementing the committee is a 
Mexican National Committee on Co-operation, 
composed largely of native ministers and laymen, 
which had elaborate plans for broad national evan- 
gelical campaigns, for the publication of a religious 
magazine, and the ultimate establishment of a 
national university patterned, in a way, after 
Robert College in Constantinople. 



IV 

EDUCATION 

OF the four great determinants of the conditions 
under which the Mexican people Uve — chmate, 
government, rehgion, and education — the last is the 
most humanly vital, and at the same time the most 
beclouded in its basic facts and tendencies. Its re- 
lationship even to the impetus to progress, surely 
the most obvious of its fimctions, is lost in the 
childish anxiety of Mexican educators to appear 
progressive and advanced, while the long quarrels 
of Church and state to control the intellectual 
processes of the yet-to-be-awakened Indian have 
made education the footbaU of poUtics and the 
door mat of revolutions. 

Probably the most teachable of all the backward 
peoples of the world, the Mexicans are to-day almost 
illiterate. Hardly a tenth of the population has 
a common-school education and more than three 
quarters can neither read a street sign nor scratch 
their own names. Keen and active as children, 
easily led, accustomed in the main to logical proc- 
esses of thought and surprisingly free from the 

prejudices even of their cousins, the North American 

195 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

aborigines, the Mexicans offer a fair field wherein 
devoted tilhng would bring forth worthy fruit. 
But always the eternal discussion of systems of 
education, the need of beautiful school buildings, 
and the shortage of inamediate fimds have absorbed 
more of the energy of Mexican educators than the 
question of increasing the number of mere school 
organizations and their efficiency in reaching the 
people. Previous to the independence, all educa- 
tion was in the hands of the Church and was 
broadly elemental, much emphasis being put on 
religion and manners and comparatively little, ac- 
cording to its critics, on the training of the mind. 
In the early days of the republic the schools were 
continued by the Church, but under the Refonn 
Laws education became a function of the state. 
In 1867 the first compulsory education laws were 
passed, in the face of pitifully inadequate facilities 
for training the children who were theoretically 
required to attend. Even then, educational sys- 
tems were always under discussion. Although for 
many years the Compania Lancasteriana, so called 
after the English educator, Joseph Lancaster (1778- 
1838), supervised such schools as there were, a Na- 
tional Congress of Education in 1889 made definite 
recommendations which resulted in the displace- 
ment of the then antiquated Lancaster system and 
the separation of the state schools from Federal 
jurisdiction, the administrative system which is in 
vogue to-day. 

The subject of educational systems continued 
controversial, however. It has been cut through 

196 



EDUCATION 

and across by the theories of the Jesuits, the theo- 
ries of the Positivists, and the contentions of prac- 
tical teachers and priests as opposed to the ideals 
of officials who apparently looked more to Mexico's 
appearance as a modern state and the avoidance of 
theological domination than to the necessity of an 
education which would really lift the Indian out of 
his lethargy and ignorance. In yet another sense 
Mexican education has been a battle between those 
who would follow conventional systems and those 
who would follow the more modern ideal of making 
education a preparation for life, between those who 
would give the uneducated native a smattering of 
learning and those who believed that this smattering 
would be injurious to hun by bringing him only 
discontent, and therefore that education should 
uplift a few with an eye to the full intellectual 
development of the Mexican people of generations 
and even centuries ahead. 

Under Madero still another ideal took hold of the 
Department of Education in a plan for general 
rudimentary education in reading, writing, and 
civics. This, however, was promptly abandoned 
under Carranza, and the chaos was made complete 
by the driving out of the priests and nuns who had 
previously maintained ahnost the only system of 
teaching in Mexico which had been based upon a 
persistent and definite conception, however false, 
of the needs of the people. For the Church schools, 
emphasizing probably too much the religious side, 
had gone on steadily through four hundred years, 

with a consistency which at least is a virtue in the 

197 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

tangled educational experiments of the period of 
independence. 

The opposition to education under rehgious control 
has had a fantastic effect on the Mexican curriculum, 
eliminating everything that smattered of theology 
and even of morals, and making the typical Mexican 
school a place where pupils are noisily taught read- 
ing, writing, and arithmetic, but where the teacher 
has little or no contact with the life of the children. 

The question of moral education, including train- 
ing in civics, ethics, and politeness, has absorbed 
untold educational energy. The fact that the 
Church held that it had the chief or only right to 
teach morals apparently resulted in the early elim- 
ination of ethics, and civics as well, from all the 
government schools. Yet the home life of the 
lower classes is so far below almost anything that is 
known in the United States or Europe, that the 
necessity of training the youth of the country to a 
conception of obligation toward the state and of 
the state's attitude toward him, becomes almost 
imperatively incmnbent upon the teachers. Only 
the Church schools ever dared assume this duty, 
and even when some factions would have been 
willing, in late years, to have definite ethical 
training in the public schools in a modem way, the 
lack of funds and the lack of thoroughly educated 
teachers made this almost impossible. 

How deep the cloud of ignorance and how inade- 
quate the provisions for dispelling it, can be grasped 
only loosely by Mexican statistics, for here, even 

more than elsewhere in the fantastic maze of official 

198 



EDUCATION 

figures, one feels ever the baffling hand of men- 
dacity, the apparent determination that no one 
shall ever really know the truth. Only the most 
progressive sections have ever given out school 
statistics, and we are asked to judge all Mexico by 
the Federal District, or Puebla, even while we are 
told that their relatively poor showing is the best 
in the entire country. 

Even the appalling figures on illiteracy are uncon- 
vincing, for again estimates are at variance with 
statistics. In 1909 Francisco I. Madero, in his 
famous poHtical handbook, La Sucesion Presi- 
dencial en 1910, stated that the census of 1900 
showed that 84 per cent of the population could 
neither read nor write, while in the Federal District 
the illiterates were 62 per cent of the population. 
This is not borne out by a compilation of the census 
figures, however, for these show that the illiterates 
at that census totaled but 80 per cent. We can 
easily beUeve that Madero's estimates are the more 
correct, but we are again baffled by the apparent 
franloiess of the government reports, which show 
only the slow gain of 2 per cent in each of the 
periods 1895-1900 and 1900-10. The foUowing 
data were hidden in twelve unassembled columns 
in various Mexican census reports : 

ILLITERACY IN MEXICO 



Year 


Total 
Population 


Ilhtehates 


PERCENTAaB 


Minors 


Adults 


Total 


1895 

1900 
1910 


12,619,949 

13,604,923 
15,150,369 


8,007,465 

{UndeT 12 yrs.) 

6,826,673 

7,165,454 


2,308,434 

(fiver 12 yrs.) 

4,095,319 

4,786,277 


10,415,899 

10,921,992 
11,951,731 


82 

80 
78 



199 



THE people; OF MEXICO 

In a bulletin published in 1912 (under Madero's 
Presidency) the illiterates were classified as "of 
school age or above/' and showed 3,615,320 "of 
school age" who were illiterates and 6,709,164 
adult illiterates, a total of 10,324,484, presumably 
at the census of 1910, or approximately only 66 
per cent of illiteracy in Mexicans of school age or 
more. There is no check against these figures, such 
as signers of the marriage register, the system 
formerly used in England, for the vast majority of 
the Mexicans of the illiterate classes do not marrj^ 
Some foreign companies have noted the illiteracy 
of their employees, one with 525 workers having only 
six who could sign their names, a proportion of 99 
per cent of illiteracy, and it is fairly safe to assume 
that outside the cities the average of illiteracy is 
90 per cent or higher. Even taking the census 
figures at their face value, the actual number of 
Mexicans who were technically literate in 1900 
was only a little over 2,700,000 in a population of 
13,604,823. When we remember that the Mexicans 
claimed that more than this number were pure- 
blooded whites, and even our revised figures ^ allow 
for 2,000,000 of "white culture," the appalling con- 
dition of education in Mexico begins to have a 
measuring stick — even if a most inadequate one. 

The statistics of schools are somewhat better, 
but here the matter is complicated by the absence 
of complete data regarding schools outside the 
Federal District and territories, and by the lack of 
full registration of the Chiurch schools. Theoret- 

iSeepage37. 

200 



EDUCATION 

ically, the Catholic schools are nonexistent, though 
large numbers of them functioned in every diocese 
in the time of Diaz, ''over 30,000 parish schools," 
with an attendance of 300,000, being mentioned 
unofficially. 

Official figures that allow for comparison do not 
begin until 1893, but in 1876, according to the 
Mexican legation in Washington, there were 8,176 
''primary schools" with an attendance of 368,754, 
while in 1895 there were 10,915 "pubhc schools" 
with 722,435 attending, or 5 per cent of the school 
population, apparently in the whole republic.^ 
The following figures^ from official reports are 
apparently meant to cover only the Federal District 
and territories : 

OFFICIAL SCHOOLS 

Classified According to Status 

Federal and state 

Municipal 



1S9S 


1900 


1906 


4,876 


6,592 


5,867 


2,957 


2,872 


3,114 



7,833 9,464 8,981 



According to Kind of Instruction 

Primary 7,616 

Secondary 173 

Professional 44 



9,363 


8,877 


41 


38 


60 


66 



7,833 9,464 8,981 



^ Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, p. 150. 
2 1. J. Cox, Monograph on Education, Doheny Reseai'ch Foun- 
dation. 

201 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 
Attendance and Progesss 

1893 1900 1906 

Enrollment 483,337 713,394 615,134 

Average attendance 346,665 490,527 

Number examined 313,204 443,120 

Number approved 242,692 367,868 325,266 

Number completing com-se 1,667 19,820 25,945 

Teaching Force and Expenditures 

1893 1900 1906 

Professors 2,376 3,451 4,004 

Salaries P794,476.94 Pl,465,140.70 Pl,737,859 

Aids and assistants 1,508 3,688 5,037 

Salaries P296,770.40 Pl,236,256.74 Pl,863,359 

Servants 609 1,266 1,427 

Salaries P65,32l P170,254.11 P216,196 

Other expenses P953,899 Pl,435,258.17 P2,310,117 

UNOFFICIAL SCHOOLS 

Classified According to Ownership 

1893 1900 1906 

Private 1,769 2,068 1,896 

Clerical 244 493 547 

Association schools 116 152 119 

2,129 2,713 2,562 

According to Kind of Instruction 

Primary 2,088 2,653 2,536 

Secondary 29 33 16 

Professional 10 27 16 

2,127 2,713 2,562 

Attendance and Progress 

Enrollment 111,142 146,709 163,020 

Average attendance 78,291 117,543 

Number examined 53,474 98,673 

Number approved 42,259 76,571 94,422 

Number completing com-se 1,922 3,946 8,910 

202 



EDUCATION 

If we take the total of official and unofficial 
schools for 1906 at 11,543, we have one school for 
every 1200 inhabitants of the country — not a bad 
showing, until we discover that the average enroll- 
ment in each school is but 62. This is even re- 
duced, in actual attendance, to about 50, if we 
take the proportion of attendance to enrollment 
indicated by the more complete reports of 1893 
and 1900. Tremendous things were done in Mexi- 
can education under Diaz, but such facts as the 
smallness of individual school organizations are the 
sort that are not emphasized. A government re- 
port on education in 1907 followed the usual method 
of ignoring the statistical facts, but stated the follow- 
ing to be the proportion of schools to population 
in the various states: 



Statistics of public instruction show that the state of Jalisco 
has one school for every 2,354 inhabitants; Aguas Calientes, 
one for every 3,103; Campeche, one for every 1,236; Coahuila, 
one for every 2,090; Chihuahua, one for every 2,731 ; Durango, 
one for every 2,468; Guanajuato, one for every 4,596; Hidalgo, 
one for every 1,020; Michoacan, one for every 2,888; Morelos, 
one for every 687; Nuevo Leon, one for every 1,158; Puebla, 
one for every 886; Queretaro, one for every 1,444; San Luis 
Potosi, one for every 2,592; Sinaloa, one for every 1,041; 
Sonora, one for every 1,092; Tabasco, one for every 1,018; 
Tamaulipas, one for every 1,777; Tlaxcala, one for every 700; 
Vera Cruz, one for every 1,268; Yucatan, one for every 792; 
Zacatecas, one for every 1,316, and Mexico, one for every 936. 



Some of the Mexican states have actually done 
considerable work in education, Puebla, for instance, 

203 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

being in many ways as advanced as the Federal 
District under Diaz. In fact, genuine progress has 
been made not only in certain states and in the 
Federal District, but also, in proportion, in many 
isolated sections. In 1900 schools v/ere rare even 
in the larger towns, while in 1910 there were at least 
school organizations in nearly every town and in 
hundreds of villages, and in President Diaz's own 
state of Oaxaca, for instance, there were schools of 
some sort, and often very fair schools, throughout 
its whole area. 

Considering the depth of ignorance and the il- 
literacy, however, the expenditures for education 
even under Diaz seem very small. Diaz's total 
government budget was less than P100,000,000 a 
year, and the appropriation for Federal schools was 
about P4,000,000. This sum was to cover the 
education in the Federal District and in the terri- 
tories, and it is probable that the money annually 
expended by the states on education would not 
anywhere approach a similar sum. Granting that 
it equaled it, however, the total possible appro- 
priation for education during the Diaz regime was 
about P8,000,000 per year, or P4 per child of ele- 
mentary-school age. Out of this, however, came 
as well the moneys for the higher educational insti- 
tutions, upon which considerable sums were spent, 
for these were among the show places of Mexican 
progress. Under Carranza the common schools 
were entirely divorced from Federal control and 
support, and in view of the fact that the sacking of 
the country had left all municipalities bankrupt, 

204 



EDUCATION 

that the antireligious trend of the revolution had 
closed hundreds of Catholic schools, and that the 
budgets of Carranza had always to meet a deficit, 
it is certain that the real expenditure for education 
per-capita child of school age was far below that of 
the Diaz time. 

In fact, the educational conditions under the 
Carranza regime were such as to wipe out much of 
the slow progress made by Diaz. The stress under 
which Carranza labored in his efforts to maintain 
his military control of the country so depleted the 
government funds that, as has always been the case 
in revolutionary Mexico (and elsewhere, indeed), 
the schools had to suffer. The Federal Department 
of Public Instruction and Fine Arts was first 
abolished, and the jurisdiction and support of the 
Federal schools was distributed, the primary and 
secondary being assigned to the municipalities, 
commercial schools to the Department of Industry 
and Labor, and the professional schools to the 
direction of the University of Mexico. The Federal 
government provided no money for the maintenance 
of the primary and secondary schools, and the muni- 
cipalities had no funds, so in May, 1915, having 
received no pay, the teachers of the Federal District 
went on a strike. 

The result of this strike, in which street -car 
employees and others joined in sympathy, was the 
appropriation of some funds for the payment of 
teachers by the Federal government, and some of the 
schools were reopened, but with reduced teaching 
force and reduced attendance. The report of a 

205 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

committee assigned to the arrangements decided 
that 86 primary and 32 secondary schools should be 
retained, 36 primary and 10 secondary being closed, 
and the selected teachers who were kept were to 
receive from P3.09 to P3.56 per day, or say about 
PlOO a month, during the school term. It is worth 
noting in contrast (although the figures are for the 
whole Federal District, including several munici- 
palities besides that of Mexico) that the Diaz record 
in primary education in this section for the quiet 
years previous to the four years of Carranza rule 
showed 296 elementary schools in 1906, 338 in 
1909-10, and (under Madero) 343 in 1911-12. 

Beyond the facts of Mexican ignorance, beyond 
the utter inadequacy of the provisions to combat it, 
looms, as ever, that hopeless problem of the system 
of education. The Mexican mind must indeed be 
trained, but the Mexican mind that must lead the 
untrained brother seeks, and justly, to know the 
road he is to travel. The determination of that 
road is not the province of this book — it belongs in 
the sphere of the science of education, and if that 
science works from the facts that exist, we can well 
hope that the problem will be solved. Mexico has 
already tried most of the systems that might be 
looked to to guide her, and probably her chief failure 
has been in that she has never yet, since education 
was taken from the Church, been able to take a 
long-distance view and to work in ordered progress 
along a predetermined road. Under Diaz the 
menace of churchly control seemed too imminent, 
and only under Diaz has Mexican government, 

206 



EDUCATION 

since the viceroys, even begun to see its problems 
whole. Under Madero, the plan for rudimentary 
education, for all the criticisms of it, had the virtue 
of being a frank facing of the Mexican educational 
problem in its uniqueness, not a slavish copying of 
foreign systems. Under Carranza, the fiasco of 
education might be called the greatest of all the 
revolutionary failures, and yet that can well be 
explained by the fact that the exigencies of govern- 
ment kept funds and vision turned to very different 
directions. 

To him who seeks simply the welfare of Mexico, 
the Hampton ideal, the training of leaders for tiny 
schools, for little towns, for the centers of groups 
that shall radiate idealism and education and the 
happiness of adjustment to life as it is, takes hold 
of the imagination. At Hampton Institute, at 
Tuskeegee, the slow work of training leaders for 
the negro race has been going on, passing through 
deep valleys of ignorance and prejudice, the crea- 
tions alike of dull, sodden despair and of polished 
yet unfitted theorizing. Yet the long road seems 
to the watcher to be nearing the crest, to be 
promising, truly, a solution of the education of a 
race. 

It may be that a similar system is the ultimate 
solution of the human Mexican problem, but it is a 
solution which so far Mexico has never accepted, 
perhaps because Mexicans dislike so much to admit 
that theirs is comparable in any way with the 
American negro problem. 

Yet education for life seems the essential need of 

14 207 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the Mexican population. The hfe that they must 
face has tremendous problems not only in the tem- 
perament, inheritance, and habits of the people, but 
in the continually growing pressure from without 
of the higher civilization which Mexico must ulti- 
mately accept. The long list of experiments in 
government which make up Mexican history has 
been essentially a struggle to graft the white man's 
ideals upon a people of a lower race type, without 
adapting the ideals to the type or educating the 
type to the ideals. The result has been a veneer 
of peaceful government, and in education a veneer 
of Latin culture. Many of the men who became 
prominent in the Madero regime were the clear- 
eyed intellectuals who had been suppressed by the 
materialism of the latter days of Diaz, and these 
men brought to the surface at that time a desire to 
look frankly upon the Mexican people as they were 
and not as it would be well to have the rest of the 
world regard them. The result was a definite 
trend toward a recognition of the necessity for 
adaptation to the psychology and needs of the 
Indian. 

All this seems to be a tending, unconscious as yet, 
perhaps, toward the Hampton ideal of education 
for life, the raising of the mass by the elevation of 
a few, and the scattering of those few far and wide 
throughout the land. The way is long, the need 
is great, and we have yet to see the beginnings. 
Industrial training as a system is still to come, the 
very education of the hands in kindergarten is 
practically unlmown. An ignorance so profound 

208 



EDUCATION 

that it is itself an enigma deadens every effort, and 
yet it seems that when the day of understanding 
comes the leaders who are yet to find the way out 
of darkness will have the torch in an education to 
the true rewards of life which will illumine even 
the depths of Indian apathy^ 



THE FAMILY 

CAPTIOUS critics of the social life of Mexico 
have been concerned that there is no word in 
the Spanish language for "home" and that what 
they call a true domestic life of the Mexican people 
is almost entirely absent. Nothing could be more 
sweepingly inaccurate, and yet this attitude is ex- 
pressive of that habit of judging Mexico by Anglo- 
Saxon standards which makes a true understanding 
of her faults as well as her virtues so difficult. 

Most listeners never get beyond the solemn fact 
that the Mexican (and the Spaniard as well) speaks 
of his ''house, " but not of his "home," yet the word 
casa (literally "house" and used commonly to 
signify the building), means, in the sense of home, 
that embattled retreat wherein one rules alone, a 
very real phase of home. Hogar, the definitive word 
for "home," is literally hearth or fireside, with an 
intimate connoted meaning of warmth and seclusion 
for which even English has no full equivalent. 

The Mexican's word casa comes, as one knows 
the people better, to be extremely expressive, for 
the outside world, native or foreign, seldom pene- 

210 



THE FAMILY 

trates behind the seclusion which wraps around the 
home hfe of any Mexican. Here linger a Spanish 
reserve and dignity that are inherent and sincere, 
and behind the walls there goes on a home life that 
is different, perhaps, but as real as, and in some ways 
even more cohesive than, the Anglo-Saxon. Father 
and mother, sons and daughters, find in this citadel 
a retreat and a fortress of unquestioning loyalty, an 
understanding that often needs no words, and a 
spirit that brooks no issue save that of the family 
unit in crisis or in criticism. 

The Mexican family group is instinctively organ- 
ized along patriarchal lines, with the father as the 
head, the ruler, the arbiter of the destinies of his 
household. In the upper and middle classes the 
father (and this means the oldest father, be he 
grandfather or great-grandfather) heads the family 
group, and is obeyed implicitly in the smallest 
details of life. He is the mentor and the inspira- 
tion of the sons and daughters, of their wives, hus- 
bands, and children, and of all the relatives who 
gather under his roof. Of all the stable elements 
which there are in Mexico (and in spite of revolu- 
tions and fantastic governmental experiments there 
are many stable elements) the Mexican family per- 
sists as one of the people's safe foundations. The 
interrelation of the families of each class in the 
towns, of all the leading groups of the landed gentry, 
and even of the ranchero class, forms true clans (an 
instinct that perhaps goes back to the Aztec gentes, 
or blood-kin groupings) each of which has a recog- 
nized head whose desires and whose existence it- 

211 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

self dominate their whole social life. Brothers and 
sisters, aunts and uncles, all have their distinct 
places; the first cousin is "cousin-brother," and the 
children themselves early find their proper grouping. 
Famiiies-in-law enter into the patriarchal arrange- 
ment, the wife joining the family of her husband, 
and when her father and mother unite in social affairs 
the husband's father, in the male line, is the head 
of the group. Close into the household are also 
brought the interesting type of friends who are 
called compadres (literally co-fathers), the com- 
padre having been a godfather to one of the children 
of the household and thus formally brought into an 
intimate and friendly association which is sealed 
forever by this honored relationship. 

The patriarchal organization also takes in the 
servants, who are a real part of every Mexican 
household, have special places at the baptisms and 
weddings, and are encouraged to link their lives and 
bring their sorrows and joys to the head of the 
house or to its mistress. The Mexican family 
organization is the basis of that patriarchal protec- 
tion of the weak by the strong which is such a 
potent element of Mexico's social solidarity. 

The Mexican family system has long been ex- 
pressed in the terms and customs of matrimony. 
Going back primarily to the Spanish idea of mar- 
riage as a churchly rite in which the husband and 
wife are united with ceremonies analogous to the 
retirement of the woman to a convent, Mexican 
marriage relationships have equally definite roots in 
the customs of the indigenous mhabitants. Mar- 

212 



THE FAMILY 

riage with the Aztecs was a contract arranged by 
the emissaries of the man, and consented to by the 
woman's family. It was consmnmated with a 
rehgious ceremony followed by a festival such as 
marks Mexican marriages to-day; there were 
certain recognized bases for illegal unions and for 
the disposition of children of such relationships; 
there were limitations to marriages between blood 
relatives, polygamy was rare, and there were 
certain forms of divorce. The patriarchal idea was 
not unlike that of the Spaniards, and the family of 
a son often lived in the household of his parents. 

With the coming of the Spaniards, the Church 
took sole control of the marriage rite, and until 
1859 the rehgious ceremony and its correlated 
significances were those of the Europe of their day, 
and marriage was a sacrament of the Church. 
After the so-called Reform Laws went into effect it 
became almost overnight a civil contract, in name 
at least. These laws of 1859, however, retained 
many of the religious features of marriage, holding 
that its bonds could be dissolved only through the 
death of one of the contracting parties, perpetuating 
the patriarchal conception of the rite. Legal sep- 
aration was authorized under certain conditions, 
but without permitting either husband or wife to 
remarry. Under the new Carranza law of domestic 
relations, however, divorce has now become a part 
of Mexican legal procedure, and, in addition, mar- 
riage has been made easier, in that many of the 
almost churchly formalities are abolished. The 

new law adds, however, to the disabilities which 

313 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

prevent legal marriage (formerly lack of legal age, 
lack of the consent, error in the statement of blood 
relationship, intimidation, and fraud) several which 
did not exist under the former law, such as habitual 
drunkenness, physical incapacity, incurable disease, 
and lunacy. In addition, the age at which marriage 
can be contracted has been raised from 14 to 16 
years for the man, and from 12 to 14 years for the 
woman, the consent of parents or guardians being 
required up to the age of 21. 

The great element influencing marriage in Mexico, 
however, is not the matter of its forms nor its re- 
sponsibilities so much as the ancient quarrel be- 
tween Church and state over the control of the 
marriage rite. The division of responsibility and 
the question of authority have so complicated the 
idea of marriage in the mind of aristocrat and peon 
alike that it seems as if only in those ranks where 
social pressure or churchly authority holds sway 
does any kind of marriage still remain as one of the 
things that "is done." The Reform Laws, and 
those of Carranza as well, recognize no Church 
marriage as legal, while the Catholic Church has 
held tenaciously that it is the one source of authority 
for the bonds of matrimony. So far is this carried 
that the priest does not require proof of a civil cere- 
mony before performing the sacrament, and on the 
other hand the Mexican government has always con- 
sistently refused to recognize church marriages or to 
deputize priests or ministers to perform the legal 
ceremony. 

There has also been the financial phase of the 

§14 



THE FAMILY 

question. Civil marriage is theoretically free, but 
the Catholic Church has always charged a definite 
sum. In earUer days the Church's fee was rela- 
tively very high, a record for the city of Chihuahua 
in 1884 being that the minimum was P18 (116 at 
the exchange rate of the day), though at the time 
the civil marriage fee was P7.50 ($6).^ In 1910 
the civil marriage fee had been entirely remitted 
practically everywhere, and the Church fee ranged 
from nothing, where the contracting parties could 
not pay, to P5 for laborers earning PI a day or 
more, the fee for most of the ceremonies being PIO.^ 

These sums were fortunes to peons working for 
50 centavos a day, but even though there were 
many occasions, such as saints' days, etc., when the 
Church performed the marriage ceremony free of 
charge, the fiesta which inevitably accompanies 
a genuine wedding in Mexico (and indeed many 
unions which are consummated without legal or 
Church ceremonies) is such an expense to the lower 
class that often they establish their households 
without the formality of either a civil or a rehgious 
ceremony, and even without a feast, making it 
informal indeed. The peon who could not afford a 
religious service cheerfully gave up the civil mar- 
riage which his priest had taught him was of no 
particular significance. 

That the disrepute of matrimony is a very real 



1 Interview No. 61, Doheny Foundation Files, the informant 
a former Protestant missionary. 

2 Interview No. 299, Doheny Foundation Files, the informant 
a member of the Mexican higher clergy. 

215 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

condition is borne out by the figures, showing a 
continuous and almost uninterrupted decrease in 
the number of marriages performed from year to 
year, despite the growth in population. The civil 
register is the only one whose statistics are available, 
but it is probable that most of those married in the 
churches have previously been married by a judge, 
for in the years where the numbers are available for 
comparison, the total of Church marriages is less 
than the total of civil ceremonies, as in 1910, when 
there were 49,938 civil marriages to 40,289 religious 
ceremonies. The decline in marriage is shown by 
the following figures, which are for civil marriages 
performed, so that the number of persons married 
and also the proportion per thousand of individuals 
is just double the figures quoted: 

NUMBER OF MARRIAGES IN MEXICO 



Year 


Marriages 


Per 1,000 


Year 


Marrlvges 


Per 1,000 


1896 

1897 

1898 

1899 

1900 

1901 

1902 

1903 ..... 


52,968 
51,000 
61,681 
59,957 
63,722 
60,227 
60,098 
60,117 


4.19 
3.89 
4.89 
4.71 
5.04 
4.38 
4.32 
4.28 


1904... 
1905... 
1906... 
1907... 
1908... 
1909... 
1910... 


61,588 
. 57,881 

56,339 
. 60,774 
. 56,359 
. 55,339 
. 54,339 


4.34 
4.03 

3.88 
4.14 
3.48 
3.70 
3.58 



Over against these can be set the marriage 
records of other countries, the number of marriages 
and not the number of persons married being given, 
as follows: United States, 10.5 per 1,000; Hungary, 
10.4; France, 7.55; Spain, 8.74.i 

1 Additional marriage rates are quoted in the table on p. 88. 

216 



THE FAMILY 

This might indicate a low proportion of actual 
child-bearing unions, this marriage rate of Mexico 
(which averages 4.04 over the ten-year period 
previous to 1910) being so low as to presage a ter- 
rific loss in population if legal marriages marked 
even the majority of the child-bearing unions. In 
the census of 1910, however, the number of '^mar- 
ried" persons reported was 4,110,761, or 2,055,380 
couples, to which should be added 907,766 widowed 
persons, indicating roughly a total of 2,963,146 
couples who must have formed their conjugal unions 
in the previous thirty years. Allowing for the 
deaths which would undoubtedly reduce the pro- 
portion of survivors of all the ''marriages" of those 
thirty years, it is safe to take merely the double of 
the previous ten-year period as roughly the number 
of legal weddings represented in this population of 
1910. The total of legal marriages in the ten-year 
period is 583,172, our arbitrary figure being 1,166,- 
344 as the legally married portion of the 2,963,146 
couples who reported themselves as "married" to 
the census takers in 1910. If we consider that 
many of the peon families were known to be un- 
married and were so reported as "single," it is 
certainly not unfair to estimate that at least two 
thirds of the child-bearing unions in Mexico are 
illegal and the children thus illegitimate. Other 
estimates place the proportion of illegal marriages 
even higher, so that this extremely arbitrary calcu- 
lation seems to be sustained. 

With the figures available, including our crude 
estimates, it is possible to make some calculation of 

217 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the fecundity of Mexican marriages. The figures 
for 1909 (those for 1910 are incomplete, three im- 
portant states being missing) show the following, in 
a calculated population of 14,997,426: 



First marriages 104,294 

Widowed 6,606 

Men— 14 to 19 yrs. 13,298 

20 to 29 " 30,856 

30 to 44 " 7,962 

45 to 59 " 2,624 

Over 60 " 710 



Mexicans 109,942 

Foreigners 958 

Women— 12 to 19 yrs. 32,978 

20 to 29 " 17,490 

30 to 44 " 3,795 

45 to 59 " 976 

Over 60 " 211 



Civil register 55,450 Church register 47,448 

The extremely early marriages in Mexico, of 
course, lengthen the child-bearing period, the fig- 
ures for 1909 here quoted showing, in comparison 
with other countries, the following age groups of 
brides, including both first marriages and widows: 



PERCENTAGE OF BRIDES BY AGE CLASSES i 



Country 


Under 20 


20 TO 30 


30 TO 40 


30 TO 45 


Over 40 


Over 45 


Mexico 


59.0 


30.1 




6.8 




4.1 


Russia 


58.0 


33.2 


6.2 




2.6 




England 


13.5 


68.9 


13.1 




4.5 




Bavaria 


6.4 


64.8 


20.6 




8.1 




France 


21.2 


59.6 


13.7 




5.6 





Over one fourth of the total number of legal 
brides in Mexico were, in the Diaz period, between 
12 and 16 years of age, and in many states, such as 



^ As usual, Mexico's groupings are at variance with usual 
standards, hence the inaccurate comparisons. The European 
figures are from Richmond Mayo-Smith's Statistics and Sociology, 
p. 105. 

218 



THE FAMILY 

Yucatan, as large a portion as 82 per cent was often 
reported as being under the age of 20. 

The physical child-bearing period of Mexican 
women is between the ages of 12 and 35, but, as 
the census cannot be depended on to list as married 
merely those who have gone through the legal cere- 
mony, we must calculate, using the data at hand, 
that if the annual legal marriages number about 
50,000, in twenty years the living population of 
legally married women of child-bearing age (with 
a death loss of about 15,000 per year in such a 
group, 12-35 years), would be about 600,000. 
The legitunate births of that year (registered 
civiUy) were 251,252, but the baptismal records of 
the Church showed 294,201, which is probably 
nearer the correct figure for legitimate births, so 
that the Mexican birth rate per 1,000 legally mar- 
ried women of child-bearing age is about 500. 
This compares with typical average figures for the 
United States, about 200; France, 166; Norway, 
274, England, 264. 

The number of children per marriage is theo- 
retically calculable by taking the number of mar- 
riages of a single year and the number of births in 
the year when the mean number of births from such 
marriages are to be expected. This gives a sur- 
prising result. In Mexico the average number of 
births comes about four years after marriage. (In 
England it is six years.) If we take the number of 
marriages in 1906 (56,339), and divide it into the 
number of legitimate births in 1910, 294,201, we 

get about 5.2 children as the average number of 

219 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

births to a legal marriage, which compares with 
Spain, 4.47; Italy, 5.15; France, 3.42; Sweden, 4.84. 
This seems low, but of course the legal marriages, 
and thus the legitimate births, are overwhelmingly 
in the higher classes, whose fecundity is invariably 
below the national average. 

The introduction of divorce under the Carranza 
laws of 1916 was intended to obviate some of these 
depressing factors and to revive the standing of 
legal marriage by providing a means of ending it if 
it had not the elements of permanency. Under the 
Diaz regime, divorce was impossible, although 
there was legal separation which dissolved the part- 
nership before the law without permitting remar- 
riage. The grounds for this legal separation 
included adultery, the birth of a child conceived out 
of wedlock when judicially declared illegitimate, 
moral turpitude, drunkenness, and mutual consent. 
All these, including mutual consent, are now 
grounds for absolute divorce. The Carranza law 
added three additional grounds — inability to 
carry out the purposes of marriage on account of 
physical incapacity; absence of the husband for 
more than one year; the commission of a crime 
meriting imprisonment or exile for more than two 
years. Adultery on the part of the wife is always 
ground for divorce, while on the part of the husband 
the wife has no case excepting, first, if the act of 
adultery is committed in the home; or, second; if it 
cause public scandal or result in public insult to 
the lawful wife; or, third, if the guilty woman ill- 
treat by word or deed the lawful wife. Divorce by 

220 



THE FAMILY 

mutual consent may not be sought until one year 
after marriage. The innocent party is awarded the 
custody of the children, except when they are under 
five years of age, when they go to the mother. 

The divorce law was, however, only one of the 
radical changes made in the fundamental concep- 
tion of Mexican marriage by Carranza's decrees. 
Matrimony has long been regarded as having only 
the end of serving the husband and father, in his 
pleasure, in his convenience, in his prestige, and in 
his desire for a large and happy family. Under the 
Roman Civil Law from which, through Spain, the 
Church, and the Code Napoleon, Mexico inherited 
so many of her customs and laws, the wife entered 
her husband's family practically on the plane of a 
daughter, her property becoming that of her hus- 
band, and he in turn assuming the obligation of her 
support and giving her full recognition as an heir. 

Upon this basis many generations of happy 
Mexican homes were built, but there is no doubt 
that in late years there has been a beginning of a 
restlessness on the part of Mexican women which, 
however distasteful it is (and it certainly is dis- 
tasteful) to conservative or typical Mexicans, was 
bound to achieve recognition sooner or later. It 
happened to be sooner, and to be given by the 
Carranza laws, laws more modem in theory than 
actually demanded by the social organization of 
Mexico at the time, but placing much new power 
and independence in the hands of the women of 
Mexico. 

The first criticism of conservative Mexicans is 

221 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

that under the new laws marriage ceases to be a 
social institution and becomes a private contract, 
easily executed and easily dissolved. Indeed, under 
the old law, the legal concept of marriage was that 
it was a true partnership in which the wife and the 
husband were each legally considered as sharing the 
benefits as well as the difficulties of the other. Now, 
under the new law, with marriage as a contract of 
association, the woman as a separate individual has 
her own obligations to meet as well as her own 
opportunities to develop. In the emancipation of 
woman, however, from the old rules which kept her 
even from independent administration of her in- 
heritance and earnings except with the consent of 
the husband, the new law is considered a distinct 
advance. 

Even to the present day, the entry of the wife 
into the Mexican household has been marked by a 
dowry and a prenuptual contract specifying her 
contributions to the new family and her rights in 
the new relationship. All else, including her in- 
heritances and earnings, belonged to the husband 
and her protection was only as his heir. Under the 
new law both wife and husband reserve ownership 
and administration of their respective properties, 
increases and accessions therefrom; fees, salaries, 
and wages belong to the party earning them. Even 
though husband and wife agree to consider all their 
properties and incomes as one, this is not binding 
upon third parties, who may seize and collect 
individually. The wife, however, has prior claim 
to the proceeds of the husband's property, his 

222 



THE FAMILY 

salary, etc. A wife may not, however, render per- 
sonal service to another or engage in business, etc., 
without the consent of the husband. 

The wife who, through no fault of her own, is 
compelled to live apart from her husband may, by 
the new law, receive alimony under a petition to the 
court, and, most important, the abandonment of 
the wile and children without provision for their 
support is punishable by imprisonment up to two 
years. The law allows the wife, if necessary, to 
assume the support, and so the headship, of the 
family, but it also compels her "to contribute 
toward the expenses of the home if she has property, 
exercises a profession or business, or is otherwise an 
earning member of the household." 

Even aside from the strictly financial relation- 
ships, the organization of the Mexican home, in the 
legal sense, at least, has undergone great changes. 
The most fundamental of these (aside from divorce) 
is the provision giving ''equal authority in the 
home" to both husband and wife in the education 
of the children, in the determination of family 
destinies of every sort, and in the investment and 
handling of family property. The Mexican home 
was formerly organized on a thoroughly utilitarian 
basis, with the father as the acknowledged head, 
while now, as Mexicans who cling to the old idea 
find, it sets up a dual authority, equally powerful 
members rivaling one another. An instance, not 
without its light upon Mexican domestic economy, 
is found in the new law where the wife is excused 
from following the husband ''if he leaves the 

15 223 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

republic and makes his home in an unhealthy 
portion of the globe or in a place not suited to the 
social position of the wife." The old law pre- 
scribed, without any limitation whatever, that 
'Hhe wife must live with the husband." 

In the case of children, the husband may still, 
as in the old days, recognize natural sons and 
daughters born either before or after his marriage, 
but he shall not take them or an adopted child into 
his home without the consent of his wife. In addi- 
tion, the new law authorizes the legal adoption of 
children, a provision which did not heretofore 
exist, but a wife may adopt a child only with the 
consent of her husband, while the latter does not 
require the wife's consent. 

Many of the fundamental supports of the patri- 
archal domination of the husband have thus 
actually been removed, and the effects will be 
increasingly evident as time goes on.- But the 
patriarchal conception of life goes very deep into 
Mexican psychology, and there is little danger of 
the finer phases of the traditional Mexican family 
relationship being lost; if any are changed, it is 
Ukely to be in the direction of a higher development 
of Mexican womanhood and a worthier attitude 
toward women on the part of Mexican men. 

The home life of any community has its roots in 
the relations of husband and wife, and where, as in 
Mexico, the first duty of a woman is to meet the 
sexual exigencies of her husband, the finer phases 
of wedded hfe are in continual jeopardy. The con- 
trol of this phase of marriage by the man has had 

224 



THE FAMILY 

much to do both with the closely confined and cir- 
cmnscribed life of the wives and with the notorious 
infidelity and laxity of the Mexican male. The 
new independence to which the Mexican wife is 
approaching seems to promise that she will not 
only be in a better position to control this as well 
as other relationships, but that she will achieve the 
education and broader outlook on life which will 
give her the wisdom to do so. Heretofore the 
Mexican wife has had but two functions — the 
pleasiu-e of the husband and the raising of children. 
The physical side of the former soon wears away, 
and the latter persists in an atmosphere often 
sorrowful and unhappy and lightened only by the 
wife's true devotion to her children. 

Although the Mexican is not without apprecia- 
tion of his women, the following poetic and sincere 
tribute by an able Latin observer, gives a list of 
admired virtues that is most illuminating: "Mex- 
ican women are the best balanced I have ever seen. 
They are good daughters, good wives, good mothers; 
they are intelhgent, sentimental, discreet, lovely, 
elegant, and prolific; they are virtuous on every 
side; no one hesitates to state that the women are 
much better than the men. . . . They are greatly 
respected by the men. ... It would be considered a 
disgrace for a married woman to have to earn her 
living. Husbands will not allow their wives to 
work."^ 

Mexican men like to ascribe more influence to 
their women than actually exists, except, perhaps, 

^ Julio Sesto, El Mexico de Porfirio Diaz, p. 218, 
225 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

in case of fiancees or favorite mistresses. The 
Mexican gentleman loves to mention the wisdom 
and influence of his wife, and to quote the ancient 
Spanish proverb, ''If your wife asks you to jump 
out of the window, pray God that the window is 
near the street." The Mexican woman is, how- 
ever, extremely limited by education and by her 
lack of contact with the world. A woman of good 
birth almost invariably studies in a convent, sees 
almost no men except her brothers and her father 
until she is married, and after marriage hardly 
meets her husband's friends unless they are in turn 
the husbands of her women friends, and even then 
under the most formal conditions, with the hmita- 
tion of the most patronizing attitude on the part 
of all the men present toward all the women present. 
But Mexican women do exercise not a httle real 
influence over their husbands. Clever and beauti- 
ful as they are in their youth, they are often able 
to overcome the inherent authority of the husband 
and father, but it has always been through cajolery 
and without the traditions, rights, or privileges 
which would make their success permanent. 

The most admired of all feminine virtues are de- 
votion and constancy, and these the wife studiously 
develops. They are trained into her from the 
cradle, and although her limitations and her lack 
of contact with boys when she is a child may make 
her morbid, as is often said of her, it does inculcate 
a conception of the value of outward virtue which 
she uses in all her relationships, and chiefly in her 
flattery of her husband. In the manifestation of 

226 



THE FAMILY 

thek devotion, Mexican women are characterized 
by a patience and endurance which extend through- 
out all classes of the repubhc. The peon women 
are especially the slaves and the drudges of their 
husbands and sons; in the middle classes a tre- 
mendous amoimt of work is done by the women in 
the home, and even in the highest ranks of Mexican 
society the woman, especially when she grows 
older, is very Hkely to become almost a personal 
servant to her husband, his valet as well as his 
housekeeper. If such a wife is badly treated she 
accepts it with resignation, because it is part of the 
service she feels she owes her husband, just as the 
peon woman accepts and endures cruelty and 
physical violence at the hands of a drunken spouse 
as one of the duties of wifehood. The end of all 
training of the Mexican wom.en for marriage is in- 
culcated docility and self-effacement, and it is an 
unwritten law in Mexico that the wife must not 
complain at her husband's paramour, her support 
at his hands and the courteous consideration he 
gives her being the return which she receives for 
her faithfulness. 

' This habit and attitude of devotion on the part of 
the Mexican wife has had much to do with the wide- 
spread and open custom of keepmg mistresses. In 
the middle and upper classes, owing in part to the 
absence of divorce, but more to the male security 
of domination in his household, the maintenance of 
mistresses long ago became a recognized social 
custom. The cult of mistresses may have had its 
beginnings in the existence of distinct strata of 

227 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

society, but in Mexico the relationship has reached 
a more settled and definite condition, as it takes in 
not only the women of a lower class than the men, 
but often women of their own class, whom they set 
up in separate establislnnents, often with the 
knowledge of their legitimate wives. In these 
casas chicas (httle houses) secondary families are 
bom, the sons and sometimes the daughters of 
which are brought into the legal family when the 
ilhcit relationship is broken off, the law recognizing 
the right of the father to the children of these 
unions. 

The mistresses are often of very good family, but 
they have no place in society, cannot be seen 
openly with their men, and yet at the same time 
are held almost in slavery by the jealousy of their 
lovers and the fact that their ease and comfort de- 
pend upon his caprice. Thus, as a Mexican writer 
has put it, ''it is not infrequently that one finds in 
the wife the frivolous disposition of a mistress and 
in the mistress the virtues of a wife." 

The Mexican man of good standing speaks frankly 
of his ''other house" and of his legitimate and il- 
legitimate children, and the gossip of the cities will 
relate not only the number of "families" of a 
prominent man, but the location of his houses, and 
the relationship of the sons and daughters who 
appear with him when his wife remains at home. 

From the highest classes to the very lowest the 
devotion of parents to children and of children to 
parents is notable. The families are large, one of 
the objects of marriage being definitely the rearing 

228 



THE FAMILY 

of a fine family, with '^race suicide" in the distant 
future. Indeed, in numbering his children a 
Mexican will count not only the living, but the 
dead as well, and not infrequently the illegitimate, 
carefully set apart in the list. 

In the family organization the Mexican boy has 
many privileges as heir apparent to the family 
throne. In play, the oldest boy assumes the role 
of director, and as the children grow older it is he 
who accompanies and chaperones his sisters when 
they go about in society, and whenever, indeed, 
he meets them outside of the home. 

The position of the girl in the Mexican home is a 
part of this same patriarchal atmosphere. She is 
protected from the cradle, is never seen in public 
with any men save her own kin, and even in meeting 
her future husband is never left alone with him. 
She lives her hfe along rigidly conventional lines, 
and until recent years received comparatively 
little education, except in the arts; each Mexican 
ghi learns to play the piano or some other instru- 
ment, to sing, to embroider, or to make artificial 
flowers. Her duties in the household consist in 
being beautiful, pious, and stiffly prim when a girl, 
and in raising children and watching their morals 
in turn when she becomes a wife. 

The manners of Mexican children of the better 
classes are almost universally good. They are 
always respectful, do not speak in company unless 
they are spoken to, excuse themselves when they 
leave the room, and, with a charm which perhaps 
the foreigner can appreciate most, always give their 

229 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

hand limply in good night and in good morning to 
the guests and to each member of the family, kissing 
the hand or the cheek of the older people. 

The child community of Mexico is, however, an 
active and vivid one. The precosity of the tropics 
shortens childhood, but it also brings to the boy and 
girl a liveher sense of the realities of life than to the 
children of more temperate climates. In play the 
Mexican child is eager, and although it is some- 
times ludicrous to note the aping of older people 
in the tiniest of boys and girls, child life runs along 
in much the same channels as elsewhere; the young- 
sters grow as rapidly, play as noisily, and fight as 
energetically as in any to^vn in the United States or 
England. 

The population of children in Mexico is, in spite 
of the high birth rate, relatively little greater than 
in the United States. In 1910 there were 2,633,168 
children of from 1 to 5 years and 5,312,001 
from 6 to 20, a total of 7,945,179 minors, or 
approximately 16.6 per cent under 6 years of 
age, and 35.8 per cent from 6 to 20, the popu- 
lation of all minors being 52 per cent of the whole. 
In the United States in 1910 the population under 
6 years was 24,000,000, or 24 per cent, between 
6 and 20, about 28,000,000, the total number 
of minors being 51,500,000, or approximately 50 
per cent. This apparent parallel is accounted for, 
however, by the fact that, while Mexican children 
die in great numbers in their early years, the adults 
who die in early maturity are also in greater pro- 
portion than in the United States, leaving the 

230 



THE FAMILY 

ultimate balance between minors and adults prac- 
tically the same.^ 

Although the patriarchal organization of the 
family seems basic in Mexico, among the lower 
classes, and at times also in the upper, there is a 
tendency toward the rule of the mother, a condition 
due in no small degree in the lower classes to the 
fact that the father has often disappeared long 
before the babies have grown to childhood. The 
loose marital relations of the peons and the promis- 
cuity with which they form temporary unions 
often results in the children of one mother ha^dng 
each a different surname, and more often in a child 
having almost no acquaintance with his father. 
The servants in households, especially in Mexico 
City, speak with great reverence of their mothers, 
and even grown men will refer matters of importance 
to the feminine head of their clan. 

In the middle and upper classes, also, the woman 
wdelds a genuine influence. Indeed, when the 
grandfather of a conventionally organized Mexican 
household dies, his power is very likely to pass to 
the grandmother (his wife), rather than to the 
eldest son, and she, grown shrewd and wise with 
years of experience, is often the virtual manager of 
great estates and a numerous progeny. 

In social life, however, it is oftenest the young 
unmarried women who receive the attention and the 
adulation of the males — ^married and single. The 
position occupied by the young matrons in Europe 
and the United States belongs in Mexico to the 

1 See p. 91 for comparative populations at different ages. 

231 



V 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

senoritas, whose charm is alone in their youth and 
personahty, so that when they retire to matrimony 
and the raising of the inevitably large family, the 
palm passes easily to their younger sisters, or, 
indeed, to the older women. Although poorly 
educated in books, the upper-class Mexican woman 
has often traveled widely and is shrewd and wise, 
so that when she has reached the years of "safety" 
she often takes a place in the entertainment of men 
guests and distinguished visitors, while the younger 
women sit in beautiful but distracting silence. 

The preponderance of uneducated women in 
Mexico continually works against the improvement 
of their position. The school statistics show that 
the Mexican girl gets even less of such education 
as there is than the boy. In 1900 there were regis- 
tered in the public schools 444,897 boys and 251,271 
girls, or only 55 girls to every 100 boys. In the 
private schools the proportion was better, as there 
were 65,921 girls and 80,788 boys, or 83 girls for 
each 100 boys, but including the schools of all kinds 
the proportion of girls to boys in what we would 
call "common schools" remains very low — 71 to 
100. Yet even these poor figures are the index of 
the intelhgence of the Mexican women of the 
future, and represent a vast improvement over the 
schooling which was given the present generation. 

Mexican women as economic units in the com- 
munity are divided sharply along lines of class. 
The peon and Indian women are universal beasts of 
burden, working in the fields and at the native 
industries such as the hand weaving of cotton and 

332 



THE FAMILY 

wool, basket and pottery making. For centuries 
they have been the mills which have ground the 
corn for the tortillas, which are the food of 90 per 
cent of the population, an appalling drudgery 
which has only of late years been lightened by the 
growing use of mill-ground meal. 

During the last ten years of revolution in Mexico 
these women of the lower classes have borne the 
burdens of battle in almost as great numbers as the 
men. Practically every soldier has been accom- 
panied by his soldadera. These camp followers 
furnish almost the only commissary, march with 
the soldiers, ride on top and under the box cars 
when the army is moved by rail, set the camps, cook 
the meals, follow the soldiers into battle to carry 
ammunition, food, and water, and, when the fighting 
is over, care for the wounded and bury their dead. 

In the middle classes there have, until recent 
years, been practically no opportunities for the 
work which, especially to the helplessly imprisoned 
spinsters, would mean relative independence. Only 
as teachers in miserable private schools, clerks in 
suburban shops, and in certain sorts of home work 
could these women earn a living. Drawnv/ork 
(which generally takes the place of or supplements 
the home industry of lace making), embroidery, and 
dressmakmg have always, as everywhere, been 
poorly paid. 

In the past twenty years business has opened its 
doors mcreasingly to middle and even some of the 
higher-class women. That this has not come 
before and that it is growing rather slowly even 

233 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

now is due, first, to the fact that the limited educa- 
tion of women in Mexico has equipped so few for 
this form of service, and, secondly, because of the 
social ostracism which even in the middle classes 
has followed the assumption of steady work by 
women. Along the northern border this prejudice 
has been fairly well broken down, but it still 
persists in the central and southern parts of the 
country.^ 

1 Women and children in industry are discussed in part ii, 
chap. X, pp. 341-345. 



VT 

MEXICAN HOUSES 

THE Mexican house, with its two-foot walls, its 
grated windows, and its secluded garden patio 
flanked by cloistered corredores — this is Mexico. 
It is epitonoic of the stream of its life, shut away 
by banks of its own building, circling and eddying 
within itseK, unmindful alike of the call of the 
rivers of the world and of its own need for outlet. 
A direct development of Spanish forms modified 
by native materials, the Mexican house partakes 
of the grace and harmony of the one and of the 
solid resistance of the other — both again typical of 
the nation the two have created. 

The Spaniards who built the Mexico we know to- 
day brought with them, indeed, the same desire to 
reproduce their homeland that animated the colo- 
nists of Virginia and New England. They built 
their New Spain, but they did more, for they 
adapted their Spanish homes and types of building 
to the materials, to the climate, and to the scenery 
which they found. Mexico to-day is in no sense 
Spain. The plazas of her villages, the flat roofs of 
her houses, the towering beauty of her churches, 

235 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

are her own, and hers alone. The rectangular form 
of her town plan takes its regularity from the 
sweeping plains of the New World, while her narrow 
streets are a heritage from older Europe made hers 
by the need of confining the tropic sun. The beauty 
of her bowered patios may be Spanish, but no 
better or more appropriate house plan could have 
been found for Mexico. 

The Spanish plazas may correspond only to the 
market places of the Aztecs, but to-day they are so 
essentially Mexican in fact and in type that no 
village of a dozen houses is complete without one. 
In the very beginning the conquerors gave to each 
Indian village a plaza as the legal center of the com- 
munal town site; here gathered the trade and barter 
of the region, and here the missionary priest erected 
his church. When Cortez rebuilt Tenochtitlan 
into the Spanish City of Mexico, the site of the 
great teocalli became the zocalo or central plaza; 
upon one side rose the cathedral, upon another the 
palace of the viceroys, and upon a third the office 
of the city's government. 

In every town in Mexico there is to-day at least 
one plaza, and always in the center is a mushroom- 
shaped band stand surrounded by dwarfed trees 
and skirted by a broad, stone-flagged walk. There 
are many inviting benches, and there from morning 
until late at night peon and Creole, native and 
foreigner, stop to sit and rest. On one night or on 
several nights each week a band plays, and the 
entire population walks round and roimd or sits 
upon the benches, listening. 

236 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

The plaza is indeed the center of the Hfe of the 
community, and often in the smaller villages the 
market place is located at one end, the church is 
always there, and always, too, some remnant of a 
Spanish administrative palace. The main plaza 
is almost invariably paralleled on one side by the 
chief street, the main artery of traffic, from which 
branch off at right angles the straight but narrow 
byways which are the city streets. 

The Mexican town plan is almost invariably 
rectangular, except where natm-e has forced an 
adaptation, as in ancient or mountainous mining 
towns. This is a relic of the Spanish regime, and 
where cities trace their origin directly to the con- 
querors or to the colonial government, this rec- 
tangular arrangement and the sprinkling of plazas 
throughout the town become almost monotonous. 
In Mexico City the streets were originally deter- 
mined by the great causeways which the Aztecs had 
built above the swamps, and these great avenues 
persist to-day, as do, also, culs-de-sac and alleys 
reminiscent of the mediaeval towns of Europe. 
Under the Spaniards great private estates, monas- 
teries, and cemeteries grew up within the city, and 
the streets wandered aimlessly between convent 
walls and grimly barred houses. Under the later 
viceroys and still more studiedly since, many long, 
straight streets were cut through old estates upon 
direct routes, all approaching more and more the 
rectangular town 'arrangement which is typical of 
the newer Mexican cities. 

By the standards of to-day, however, the streets 
237 - 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of Mexican towns are extremely narrow, and this 
narrowness is aggravated by the fact that in olden 
times there were no sidewalks, and to build them the 
vehicle space has had to suffer. Thus in Mexico 
City even the busiest streets are cramped and diffi- 
cult of passage, while in the older, outlying sections 
even of the capital, sidewalks are often completely 
absent for blocks at a time. 

The typical Mexican street is about twenty-five 
feet from wall to wall, with sidewalks three to four 
feet wide, and the vista one of flat, tinted walls 
seldom more than two stories in height, stretching 
off, irregular and lonely, into the distance. Fine 
houses and hovels stand side by side. There are 
no lawns, windows are barred and shuttered, and 
the entrance to each house is closed by double 
wooden doors, iron-studded and often deeply 
carved. Only when these doors are opened can 
the passer-by find any touch of green, for it is almost 
directly behind them that the Mexican patios or 
inner gardens are laid out. The houses of two or 
more stories invariably have balconies on the upper 
floors, narrow, the railings of ornamental iron, and 
entered from behind through French windows. No 
eaves hang over into the street and no chimneys 
rise above the roof tops. Behind the barred win- 
dows of the lower floor sit always silent women and 
girls, watching for their brief glimpses of life out- 
side. At night the front rooms of private houses 
are Hghted, and as one passes on the street one turns 
always to glance within through the uncurtained 
windows. The loneliness in the narrow highway 

238 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

and the intimacy that one feels with the women 
who are always watching through those windows 
make the Mexican street itself typical of the Mexico 
that is so close about one and yet so distant from 
true understanding. 

This is the residence street in Mexico. Where 
business thrives, whether it be the business of great 
stores or the traffic of small ones, everything is 
easy animation. A Spanish grocery with a glimpse 
of dingy counters and shelves of merchandise 
reaching up into the dimness of weathered rafters, 
a pulque stall or a saloon, a pungent barber shop 
with a row of game cocks tethered at safe distances 
along the street curb in front, form the background 
for an eternally repassing throng of peons in peaked 
hats and lordly blankets, of dull-clad women with 
babies on their backs, of loud-voiced sellers of fruit 
and candy, of pompous business men walking and 
gesticulating two by two, and even of bepowdered 
ladies on their way to a merienda. 

The determinants of the type of Mexican houses 
are tradition, climate, and the building materials 
available. In the hot country practically all the 
better houses are made of adobe (sun-dried brick), 
usually tile-roofed, while the native huts are of airy 
bamboo or upright sticks plastered with mud and 
roofed with thatches of straw or piled-up leaves of 
the palm tree. The country peon is his own archi- 
tect and builder, and the skillful thatching which 
one finds in Europe is quite beyond his ken, and 
not even the wet discomfort which he might avoid 
has ever taught him to devise a permanent thatch. 

16 239 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The roof is most often straw or palm leaves merely 
piled on a set of slightly sloping poles, the only 
effort at permanence being earth which is thrown on 
top or boards held down by rocks which on some 
day of unwonted energy the peon found time to put 
in place. The common palm with its long fronds 
should make an excellent roofing material, if 
properly plaited, and yet even this gift of nature 
for his housemaking has not been adapted. So in- 
adequate indeed are the methods of housebuilding 
that plantation managers long ago began importing 
sheet iron for roofs and rough timber for the sides 
of the huts which they erect for their employees. 
The floor of the hot-country hut, as of the city 
peon's hovel, is of dirt and accumulated dust. It 
is the home of thriving colonies of fleas and other 
vermin, but these invaders are not connected, in 
the peon mind, with this architectural peculiarity. 

In the towns and on the plateau the type of 
house is more essentially Spanish, with one or two 
stories, invariably flat-roofed, with no gardens 
surrounding them, and with the patio as the most 
characteristic feature. In the older days the finer 
buildings were a combination of store and residence, 
the store on the street level, the residence above. 
In times of peace the Mexican town plan developed 
away from this idea, but even to-day the upper 
floors of the buildings in the central streets of 
Mexican cities still contain some of their most 
beautiful homes. 

Generally, however, the flat-roofed buildings in a 
Mexican town are one story in height. These low 

240 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

buildings are common not only in the earthquake 
section of southern Mexico, but also in the north 
and in the coast towns, where earthquakes are not 
to be feared. Land is not expensive, and, besides, 
the native building materials do not lend them- 
selves to high construction. 

Indeed, the building materials available have 
had much to do with the heavy architecture typ- 
ical of Mexico. The majority of Mexican towns 
are not near stone quarries, and there is little 
structural timber in the country, except in the 
high mountains or in the tropical jungles, so that 
sohd stone houses are rare and frame dwellings 
almost unknown. The materials available for 
Mexican construction are chiefly the native clay 
and various soft subsoil stones which are shaped 
with a saw. The adobe, which is a sun-dried brick 
made of straw and clay, about 6x12x24 inches, 
enters into the structure of the majority of Mexi- 
can buildings, for when it is covered with plaster it 
has considerable permanence. In addition to this 
there is, aroimd the central section of Mexico, a 
composite soapstone known as tepetate, which is 
shaped as it is taken from the ground, and hardens 
on drying. Texontle is the name given to a light, 
porous limestone which is also easily cut when first 
taken out, hardening upon exposure to the air. At 
Monterrey there is a similar stone called sillar, 
which, when protected by plaster or cement on the 
outside, gives a comparatively permanent structure. 
All these materials, from adobe to texontle, have to 

be formed into large blocks in order to be sufficiently 

24X 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

stable for building purposes, and this necessity for 
large-sized units in structure is perhaps the chief 
reason for the massive buildings in Mexico. 

With the advent of the modern period under 
General Diaz, there was a great increase in the use 
of brick of the small oven-baked type familiar else- 
where in the world, while increasingly many struc- 
tures have been built of stone brought by rail from 
distant quarries. There are in all Mexican cities 
modern buildings of these materials, but they have 
as yet had but little influence upon the type of con- 
struction. Modern American or European houses 
have been built in new sections of Mexico City and 
elsewhere in the republic, but the tendency toward 
this type is very slow, and it is doubtful whether, in 
the long run, these buildings will replace the thick- 
walled, low structures, with their bright patios, 
which are in many ways so much more suitable for 
the country. 

Mexican houses are built without cellars. There 
is a good reason for this in Mexico City, where the 
moisture from the underlying swamps still tends to 
seep upward through the soil. But the absence of 
cellars also means the absence of foundations; even 
under modern structural methods the foundation is 
merely a great mde base of cement or stone, set 
in a trench only a foot or two deep, and proportion- 
ate only in breadth to the height of the proposed 
wall. 

The flat roofs of the houses of Mexico are paved 
with smooth tile or brick and finished with asphalt, 
or, in these days, made with patent roofing material, 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

There is only a slight dip in these roofs, but a 
cornice keeps the water, even in the rainy season, 
from dripping into the street, and it is carried off, 
as a rule, in gutters to the ground, into the patio 
fountain, or to the great earthen jars which cor- 
respond to the rain barrel in American rural com- 
munities. Another type of permanent roof in 
Mexican towns is a direct Spanish importation — ■ 
red or green tile. These are common in small 
towns and on the haciendas, but are seldom found 
in the cities. They are built with a low pitch and 
the overhanging eaves carry the rain water into the 
streets. 

Observers are likely to consider that the old 
buildings, made of native material, are more per- 
manent than modem brick structures with lighter 
walls. This is, to a certain extent, true, but where 
this old type of building has been permanent, almost 
invariably the structures have been built of stone, 
and a stone building with walls four feet thick and 
of a height of two stories is natin-ally more lasting 
than the modern structure with walls of but eight 
to ten inches. None of the houses of the Aztecs 
has come down to modem times, while Europe still 
has fine examples of Gothic architecture long ante- 
dating the original Aztec buildings. The chroniclers 
of the conquest spoke enthusiastically of the great 
palaces of the Aztecs, but of them all only a few 
truncated temple pyramids and a few half-ruined 
and bmied walls remain to reward the archaeologist. 
Such frank descriptions as remain of those great 
"palaces" tell of low walls, endless forests of posts 

243 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

supporting the roofs (for the Aztecs apparently did 
not know the arch), dirt floors, and the almost com- 
plete absence of window openings. A picture 
which, if we combine it with the realization that 
the houses which crowded the Aztec capital and 
which the Spaniards and their allies destroyed by 
hand as Alvarado retreated before the hordes of 
Aztecs on the ''Dismal Night" of defeat, were 
probably all of adobe, gives a fair explanation of the 
absence of survivals of Indian domestic architecture. 
Stone, which usually had to be transported vast dis- 
tances without any traction animals, was used 
almost alone for idols, for foundations, and for 
facing the sides of the pyramids. 

The oldest domestic structure which is still in 
use in Mexico bears the date 1528, seven years after 
the conquest, and is a private house of modest pro- 
portions in one of the older streets of the capital. 
The buildings of the colonial era, including a rela- 
tively few private houses and consisting chiefly of 
massive pub he buildings and churches, make up 
most of the truly permanent structures of the coun- 
try, for the Spaniards, who were builders second 
only to the Romans, used the most solid of native 
materials and such stout cements (burnt lime was 
introduced by them) that to this day old churches 
or palaces give way to modern progress only at the 
urgence of heavy charges of dynamite. These 
colonial buildings are all either of the ornate and 
massive church architecture, or the low, ponderous 
type of the National Palace in Mexico City, mag- 
nificent only in its inomensity. 

244 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

During the wars of independence there was prac- 
tically no permanent building, so that we must 
again leap to the era of Diaz to find another type 
of structure. Always the architecture and the 
materials so well proven by the Spaniards are used 
in domestic construction in Mexico, but during the 
latter years of Diaz a number of modern steel 
buildings went up, the most important being the 
new Post Office, patterned after the Doge's Palace 
in Venice, and the National Theater, as yet incom- 
plete. For about ten years, beginning in 1905, 
there was considerable building of residences of the 
so-called American type — structures of baked brick, 
usually without a patio, and with comparatively 
thin walls. These buildings have withstood a 
number of severe earthquakes, but otherwise have 
proven themselves not very well adapted to Mexican 
weather. The Mexican does not care for artificial 
heat, so that, although the modern houses and flats 
are sometunes equipped with fireplaces, these never 
take the place in the Mexican mind of his sun- 
warmed patio. In the summer months the patio 
is as cool as it is warm in the winter, and the typical 
thick walls are resistant to heat or to cold and keep 
the inner rooms always relatively comfortable. 

The chief characteristic of Mexican architecture 
is this patio, or inner court. Public and business 
buildings, even the more modern ones, are built 
around endless chains of these courts, large, airy, 
light. The patio of the private house is the typical 
one, however. The great double doors from the 
street (true porte-cocheres) open toward the sunlit 

245 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

patio, a charming picture framed by the dark, 
stone-paved passage. The patio in a Mexican 
house of the better class is filled with potted 
flowers, and sometimes has grass plots and walks, 
although the usual type is a cemented, flagged, or 
graveled space with a fountain in the center. In 
the old days, when water was distributed by open 
gravity aqueducts, these fountains were often con- 
nected with the city water system and were the 
only source of water in the house or, where they 
were not connected, were the reservoirs of the day's 
supply, which was brought by the servants from 
the fountain in the near-by plaza. 

The patio is flanked on all four sides by tile- 
paved corridors six to fifteen feet wide, upstairs 
and down, the floor and roof supported on stone 
arches or iron posts. The stairway to the upper 
floor is usually in the corridor, open to the weather. 
The rooms which face upon the court — and this is 
practically all, because there are no outside rooms 
except those looking on the street — are fitted with 
narrow double glass doors, giving them their only 
light and air. Wooden shutters on the inside 
shut out the hght when desired. 

The rooms are either square, large, and coldly 
high, or in the shape of a long rectangle (as the 
dining room and the sola, or drawing-room). Mex- 
ican rooms are usually as much as twelve or fifteen 
feet high; the ceilings are not plastered, and either 
the great closely studded four-by-eight-inch beams 
are exposed, or are covered by a painted canvas ceil- 
ing, which rises and falls in the wind with ghostly 

246 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

deliberation. The walls are usually painted, wall 
paper being uncommon. The woodwork is painted, 
though sometimes there is handsome paneling of 
French style. The windows and doors are all long 
and narrow, two doors or two windows opening 
French fashion. 

All the rooms of a true Mexican house, including 
the bedrooms, are floored with tile, the Mexican 
supply house presenting a large stock of different 
patterns, these proper for a parlor, those for a 
dining room or bedroom. Such floors may be 
partially covered with rugs, but often the cold tile 
presents the only floor surface. In the more 
modern houses, and where foreigners have insisted, 
wooden floors are laid, and rugs are used as else- 
where in the world, but the dampness of the wet 
season makes carpets at least inadvisable. 

Even in the best of the old houses there were no 
comfortable bathrooms, and the only conveniences 
were a toilet and a shower upon the first floor, but 
not always on the second. The Mexican bathroom 
is for bathing only; it is a large tiled or cement- 
floored chamber into which no sunlight ever enters, 
with a drain in one corner and with a shower bath 
for the warmer, and a movable metal tub for the 
cooler, season. 

The Mexican kitchen, a great, dark hole at the 
back of the house, is fitted with running water in a 
stone or cement sink, and on one side is a wide, 
colorful brick or tile counter with innumerable 
square holes where charcoal is burned for cooking 

each individual dish. Oil and gas burners are now 

247 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

found, but few coal or wood stoves, and little 
electrical apparatus. 

Mexican houses are not well adapted, architec- 
turally, to cleanliness. Even bedrooms seldom get 
sunlight, and are very liable to be damp, and in the 
rainy season even moldy. Such scrubbing of the 
tile floors as is done makes them more than usually 
slippery for several days afterward, and it is at the 
peril of one's life and limb that the servants of a 
well-regulated Mexican house are kept busy with 
wash pail and soap. 

Furniture varies with the social or race class of 
the owner, the Indians in their palm huts being con- 
tented \^dth mats for beds, a rough brazier made out 
of an old square five-gallon oil tin, another of these 
universal vessels for the day's supply of water (for 
all purposes), a few pottery bowls, a grinding stone 
for tortilla meal, sometimes a table and chair (but 
as often not), and always a shrine before which 
burns a tiny candle. Light, when used, is by tallow 
or paraffine dips. There is literally nothing else 
in the one-room hut of adobe or bamboo, and ap- 
parently no need for anything. 

The workingmen of the cities show their ad- 
vanced caste only in the possession of a rough bed 
of flexible sticks or leather thongs and a table and 
chairs of begrimed white pine. The Mexican house 
of higher type is furnished well or ill, as the taste 
may be, but in the vast majority chairs and a sofa 
of Austrian bentwood, cane-seated and draped in 
the back with a bit of coarse embroidery, are the 
basis of the fmTiishing of the sala, or drawdng-room. 

248 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

A round table, sometimes books, and often, too, 
artificial flowers under glass, help to fill the dreary 
space of the uxunense rooms. The floors are of tile, 
with a few rugs, or sometimes onlj'- strips of mat- 
ting. In the upper classes the furnishings are often 
elegant, always expensive, and usually dominated 
in taste by the style most favored in the Paris 
department store from which they came. 

As a rule, Mexican rooms are either bare and 
cold or overfm-nished, a fault as much as anything 
of the architecture which has made them long and 
narrow or else square in such exact proportion to 
their great height that they give one the sense of 
being inside a perfectly proportioned hat box- 
probably the two most difficult shapes of room to 
furnish pleasingly. 

The dining rooms are fitted in the taste of the 
owner, but never with great attention to details, 
even the linen (where used) being of poor quality, 
and the silver almost invariably of the German 
variety, in metal and in style. 

The typical Mexican bedroom is usually cold and 
uninvitmg, with its tiled floors and tiny rugs, its 
great wardrobe and the "washstand set" on a 
bentwood stand in the corner. The upper classes, 
of course, use modern beds, usually elaborately 
fitted. The middle-class bed is very likely to be a 
frame of plaited leather thongs, with a thin mat- 
tress, but the ownership of a fine brass bed with a 
lace spread and "snowy" linen is one of the signs of 
prosperity. When this is possessed, it is placed in 
the front room where it can be seen by all passers- 

249 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

by, and in the early evening, when the rest of the 
house is practically unlighted, this elaborate bed- 
room will have its lamp burning and its shutters 
wide open, for all the world to see and admire. 

The universal bed of the Indian and peon is 
the petate, a woven mat of palm fiber, laid upon the 
floor. There, with his single zerape, or blanket, he 
hes down to sleep, sometimes with something under 
his head, but more often with nothing, a bed 
astonishingly comfortable even to one who is used 
to mattress and springs. In Yucatan and some of 
the other hot-country sections hammocks are used 
for sleepmg. The Yucatan hammock, of finely 
spun henequen fiber, or of linen or cotton cords in 
varied colors, is so broad that one could lie full 
length across it. To sleep in a hammock, one lies 
at a slight angle, so that the body is not quite hori- 
zontal; when the haimnock is properly made and 
swung this makes one perfectly comfortable. In 
the hot country, where insects are common, beds 
and hammocks all have mosquito bars, which, as a 
rule, have to be extremely finely woven if they 
keep out all the pests. Indeed, very often the 
mosquito '^bar" is a shroud of thick cheesecloth, 
or even muslin, which keeps out the air as well as 
the mosquitoes, although when one has attempted to 
sleep without this protection one is hkely to be 
willing to forego his air in the future. 

The lower classes of Mexico seem to have a na- 
tional habit of sleeping together, the entire family 
and often the domestic pets being huddled into a 
heap in a single chamber, with all the doors and 

250 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

windows closed. In the plateau, during the winter 
when the nights are chilly, it is probably hterally true 
that the wann-blooded family pig is often included in 
the pile. A traveler in the tropics reports that when 
stopping one night with an Indian family during a 
chilling stomi, he was given the position of honor 
at one side of the hut, and discovered that this spot 
was desirable because the pig slept on the other 
side of the separating wall of bamboo and com- 
municated a great deal of excellent animal heat. 

The statistics of Mexican housing are as yet 
inadequate, but in 1900 a number of the states, 
representing about 7,000,000 inhabitants, or about 
half the population, gathered some data. As this 
group included the Federal District with Mexico 
City, and states with large rural population like 
Puebla, Tlaxcala and the state of Mexico as well, 
these reports can fortunately be taken as an index 
of the type of housing in Mexico, and doubling the 
figures for houses and families gives a fairly safe 
approximation for the whole country. In this 
group there were 847,523 buildings of one or more 
stories, or 1,695,046 for the whole country, and 
803,257 huts, or 1,606,514 for the country. Of the 
total nmnber of buildings in the half of the country 
reporting, 803,257, as above, were huts, 833,035 
were one-story permanent structures, 13,362 two 
stories, 1,069 three stories, 52 four stories, and 5 of 
five stories or over. All of the last named were in 
Mexico City, and probably constitute the total for 
the country, while 45 of the four-story and 659 of 

the three-story structures were also in the capital, 

g5l 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Of actual dwellings, the figures are given for 
''apartments" and for "one-room apartments," 
71,031 of one room and 902,744 of more than one 
room being reported for the section under survey, 
142,062 one-room apartments and 1,805,488 of 
more than one room being the approximate total 
for the country. 

The homes are divided into three classes — those 
"living in houses," those living in one room, and 
those living in huts. The following approximate 
figures for the country were obtained as above by 
doubling the figures for the section surveyed. It 
is unfortunate, but perhaps not entirely accidental, 
that the figures do not go into the detail of the 
sizes of the famiUes Uving in single rooms or huts, 
the division being only between those living alone 
and those Hving in a conjugal state ("famiUes of 
two or more"). However, from these figures we 
find that the Mexican living arrangements are 
about as follows: 





Single Persons 
Alone 


Families of 
Two OB More 


Total 
Families 


In houses or apartments 
In one room 


70,213 

9,158 
38,580 

117,951 


1,440,610 

96,672 

1,753,986 

3,291,268 


1,510,823 

105,830 

1,792,566 

3,409,219 


In huts 


Total 



This shows, of course, the tremendous preponder- 
ance of the rural community living in huts among 
the poor, and is surprising in the relatively small 
number of poor living as families in one-room 
apartments. By these figures the typical Mexican 

252 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

family is approximately four in number, which 
seems low, and yet this is borne out by checks 
against birth rates.^ The number of single persons 
living alone seems about 4 per 100 households, as 
against the proportion in France, 14; the United 
States, 3.6; and Germany, 7. 

As to the kind of dwellings indicated by these 
statistics, the only divisions we have are between 
huts and other houses, but even without further data 
the figures are still illuminating, for the total of one- 
room apartments and huts is only about 50,000 less 
than the number of respectable dwelling places — 
half the homes of Mexico are in the veriest hovels. 

The matter of crowding and tenement life is one 
of the important phases of any national living 
problem. In Mexico, however, it is chiefly a con- 
dition of the capital, where alone true tenement and 
slum sections are found. The Indians and peons 
live in miserable hovels all over the country, and 
there is always crowding (usually from choice), but 
except for the capital there is nothing that can be 
considered a chronic condition. 

The slums of Mexico City are in the southwestern 
and southeastern sections, and consist of what are 
called casas de vecindad ("contiguous houses" or 
"neighborhood houses"), ancient buildings with 
rows of rooms, like stables, about a single patio, 
usually with a stone fountain in the midst of a 
vast mud puddle, in the center — the only water 
supply for hundreds of people. Usually one story, 
but presenting more terrible conditions still when 

1 See p. 219. 

253 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

there are two stories \vith winding back-corridors, 
these buildings consist of single rooms, each one 
the home of from four to twenty people. Without 
furniture, sometimes with a hand loom crowded into 
one corner, and a poisonous charcoal brazier cooking 
a vile stew in another, these places, usually not 
over twelve feet square and with a yet lower ceiling, 
reek with the stench of unwashed humanity, foul 
air, excrement, and decaying food — but they are 
home to nearly a quarter of the city's population. 

Official reports on crowding in Mexico City made 
in 1900 showed that in one district there were 
2,550 rooms with 18,523 inhabitants, or an average 
of seven to a room; another counted 11,000 rooms 
and 42,000 persons. The Superior Board of Health 
estimated that the overcrowded population of the 
capital was 100,000, and that in one section about 
1,000 rough huts housed 5,000. 

Even these figures give an inadequate pictiu"e of 
conditions, for the average of four or five or even 
seven to a room over large areas leaves only the 
imagination to picture the hundreds of rooms that 
actually do house twelve or even twenty persons, 
brothers and sisters, parents and children, cousins 
and brothers-in-law, grandparents and young girls, 
under the same roof, the same ceiling, and on cold 
nights, certainly, under the same blanket. 

Not the least terrible feature of this crowding is 
the huddling of the homeless into the mesones, or 
ancient hostelries where once horses and mules, 
carts and stagecoaches, had headquarters, but 
which are to-day cheap lodging houses of the vilest 

254 



MEXICAN HOUSES 

sort. In the great city where the homeless are 
numbered by thousands, these places, charging from 
three to five centavos a night, were the only homes 
of perhaps 25,000 persons in the time of Diaz, and 
to-day their patronage has been swollen by increas- 
ing poverty and by the influx of refugees from the 
interior. The city used to maintain two pubHc 
dormitories, and three or four more were kept by 
private individuals or benevolent societies, but these 
were not so well patronized, perhaps because the 
guests were required to wash their faces and hands 
in the morning, or even to take a bath. In the 
common meson, the patrons, men, women, and 
children, begin to arrive about eight o'clock. Each 
pays his three or five centavos, takes a petate from 
a pile at the door, and picks his place in the great 
galeras (or galleys) where were formerly the stalls 
of horses. Eighty or more people of all kinds and 
ages sleep in each galera, from 200 to 300 in a single 
meson. Some of the sleepers are sober, some are 
drunk; some are clothed in aU kinds of coverings, 
some practically bare, lying side by side like mem- 
bers of the same family, men, women, and children. 
Effort has been made in many directions through 
a number of years to remedy some of the evils of 
the housing systems of Mexico. City and private 
charity has done something, but the most important 
and in the end the ultimate hope of reform has been 
in the hands of private commercial concerns. 
About Mexico City several companies, foreign as 
well as Mexican, have built model ''colonies" for 

peons as well as for the middle and upper classes. 
17 255 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

All through the later years of Diaz the rising middle 
class of artisans and the more intelligent peons were 
buying, on easy terms, the houses in each new 
suburb as it was opened. Certain conventions long 
considered indispensable in Mexican homes have 
had to be followed, but the new "colonies" had all 
to be well drained, and with plenty of water. 
Something was still being done under Carranza, 
while many of the higher-type Mexican exiles are 
planning their part in such a revitalizing of the 
community — when the time shall come for them to 
return to Mexico. 

In the interior, both on plantations and at the 
mines, the employer has long had supervision over 
the housing of his employees. On most haciendas 
the huts of the workers belong, in some way or 
another, to the hacendado, and are built and fitted 
well or ill, according to his lights. The native is 
not always a wise judge of what he will ultimately 
enjoy, but in time, and under sufficient surveillance, 
he uses the conveniences provided for him. 

The work of this type which is being done by 

American and British companies in the oil fields 

and in the mining camps deserves the highest praise, 

even though such organizations know, better than 

any others, the definite financial return that comes 

from happy and healthy employees. None of the 

companies can be singled out here, but the work 

they have done individually, and the example which 

they have set their workers and other employers of 

Mexican labor as well, must, in years to come, bear 

ample fruit. 

256 



VII 

Mexico's foods 

IN no phase is the unity of Mexican life so marked 
as in the people's choice of food. Except for 
the highest Creoles, who retain their European 
tastes, the same types of food are taken and relished 
by all classes. Quality and quantity vary with the 
income, but there runs through the entire scale of 
Mexican diet the same desire for and enjoyment of 
rich, greasy, and nitrogenous foods, relieved only by 
unleavened corn and fiery condiments. The Indian 
and the peon live almost solely on tortillas of corn 
meal and the nutty Mexican beans, or frijoles, cooked 
with grease and flavored with hot peppers; the 
highest mestizo eats a sohd meal which is of much 
the same dietary consistency, and frankly prefers 
tortillas to white bread; even if he takes white 
bread from a sense of class, he still has tortillas 
with the frijoles that round out his every meal. No 
Mexican seems really to enjoy a salad and eats 
little fruit at meals, and the sweet is taken in a con- 
centrated form, the usual Mexican dessert coming 
from the confectionery store. In the upper mestizo 

classes the hot pepper, or chile, is almost as much 

257 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

esteemed as it is by the Indian, and the majority 
in all classes add the stimulant of liquor or strong 
coffee whenever procurable. 

Com or maize is the staff of life in Mexico. 
Wheat does not grow successfully there, while corn 
is perfectly indigenous, so that the corn diet of the 
Mexican was originally forced upon him by the 
climate. The fact that the Mexican, even of the 
upper classes, actually prefers corn to wheat food 
would seem also to indicate that the climate has 
done more than force him to grow corn; it has 
forced him to desire it and eat it. 

The Mexicans as a people are meat eaters when- 
ever it is possible, and there is comparatively little 
real demand for vegetables. Potatoes are not 
used generally, rice being commonly substituted, 
and where in the United States the secondary staple 
vegetable is the tomato, in Mexico squash takes its 
place. This is served in a number of ways on the 
middle-class table, but is never particularly appe- 
tizing or tasteful, and as a general thing the Indian 
and peon classes have very little interest even in 
this one common vegetable. Meat is usually fried, 
or, if roasted, is either thoroughly larded with 
skewers of fat or basted in a greasy sauce. On the 
tables of the wealthy two courses of meat are 
conmaon, and eggs take the place of fish or precede 
the fish course as a regular part of dinner. 

The day's meals of the middle and higher class 

Mexicans begin with a Ught brealdast called des- 

ayuno, taken on rising or in bed about seven o'clock. 

This consists of strong coffee vvdtli hot mill^, oi* 

258 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

thick chocolate, and sweet rolls of wheat flour — the 
only formal appearance of wheat in the Mexican 
daily menu. Almuerzo, which is literally trans- 
lated breakfast, but is perhaps more properly 
called luncheon, comes at about eleven or twelve 
o'clock. This meal starts with a thick soup, 
followed by a single meat course, sometimes squash 
as a separate course, then beans with tortillas, and 
last an insipid dessert. Coffee or liquor is usually 
served with this meal. In some sections of the 
country almuerzo is truly a second, heavier break- 
fast, served about nine or ten o'clock, and the noon 
meal is called comida, or dinner. The long period 
from the finish of the midday meal until eight or 
nine o'clock in the evening when the heavy dinner 
is served is broken by a 'Hea" or merienda of coffee 
or chocolate and cakes. The Mexican business 
man does not make this ''tea" a regular part of 
his day, as is common in other countries where there 
is a long afternoon between luncheon and dinner. 
If he takes any refreshment at all it is in the form of 
a drink at the club or cantina (saloon), though this 
does not partake of the formality of the aperitif 
hour in France. 

The dinner (comida, or, in some sections, cena, 
literally supper) is the heavy and formal meal of 
the day, and its hour persists with Mexicans the 
world over — 8 to 9 p.m. Again there is. a soup 
always followed by eggs, either as a substitute for 
the fish course or preceding it. After eggs or fish 
come the meat courses, one of them served with 

rice; in the higher classes bread has appeared with 

- 259 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the eggs .or fish. Folio wmg the meat courses come 
the inevitable frijoles, served in any of their many 
ways, but usually for the heavy meal cooked a little 
less richly than at noon. Tortillas are almost 
invariably served with the beans on the Mexican 
table. Again, the dessert is an insipid French 
pastry or a square of paste or jelly of guava, plum, 
peach, or apricot. Coffee follows or is served during 
the meal. Where it can be afforded there is always 
wine, and with the demi-tasse either imported 
cognac or a small glass of native brandy often 
poured into the coffee. 

The diet of the peon laborer varies surprisingly 
little from that of the higher classes. The ordinary 
breakfast of the peon is bought in the doorways of 
saloons in the peon quarters, where women sell 
coffee or chocolate or a tea made from an infusion 
of orange leaves, at one to two centavos a cup. 
Another centavo of bread and a tiny glass of native 
brandy (formerly one centavo) to mix with the coffee 
or tea constitute the peon breakfast. On special 
occasions he will have a later almuerzo, or breakfast, 
of what we might call chile con came, a sort of soup 
with beans, sometimes small particles of chopped 
meat and red peppers, a dish which in the old days, 
with its accompanying three tortillas, cost three cen- 
tavos. The noon meal, taken at much the same 
time as the more formal ahnuerzo or comida of the 
middle and upper class Mexican, consists of a soup, 
then a big piece of meat with rice, and a dish of 
frijoles with from six to eight tortillas. Such a 
meal as this used to cost from six to ten centavos. 

260 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

This luncheon is usually eaten in the open air at 
one of the innumerable Httle stalls in the market 
places or in the doorways of houses along the 
streets where the peon worlanen are to be found. 
The comida, or dinner, is usually taken in the fonda, 
or rough Mexican restaiuant, where only the lower 
classes or those addicted to their stimulating diet 
go. This comida (perhaps better in this case cena, 
or supper), is usually a hght meal with the peon. 
He formerly got his large dish oi frijoles cooked in 
grease for two or tliree centavos, and in the old 
days the price of five tortillas was one centavo. 
Chopped meat, boiled or fried with chile, sometimes 
entered into this meal, under the name of carnitas, 
or "little meats." In Mexico City this, and usually 
the noonday meal as well, is washed down with an 
immense glass of pulque, of which the price used to 
be two cents for almost a quart. These prices have 
now about doubled. 

The two staples of the Mexican diet, then, are 
frijoles and tortillas. There are two types of 
Mexican beans; one is a small black variety very 
little larger than the Boston or navy bean, and the 
other the large piuk kidney bean which is known in 
our own markets. No other sort will be used by a 
Mexican, for the nutty flavor, particularly of the 
small bean, is really vital to his enjoyment of his 
food. The beans are bought dried, are soaked, and 
boiled over a slow fire. The water in which they 
are cooked forms the sauce in which the beans are 
served, with practically no addition except the 
seasoning of salt. This is the form in which they 

261 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

are usually eaten at the heavy dinner at eight or 
nine o'clock in the evening. The beans served at 
the noon meal next day are those which were 
cooked for the previous night, recooked in more 
elaborate style. The usual way of preparing beans 
for the second serving is to pour them with the 
sauce into a hot skillet of lard, sometimes stirring 
in a plentiful amount of grated cheese. The whole 
is cooked a few minutes longer and served almost 
dry. Sometimes beans are mashed and ''refried" 
until a thin brown crust covers both sides of the 
omelette-shaped mass. The cooking of beans in 
Mexican style is a true art, and provides a dish 
which appeals to any appetite. The Mexican 
himself recognizes the universality of beans in 
his diet, and his jocose invitation to a meal is, 
''Come home with me to beans." 

The Mexican tortilla is made of ground corn 
which has been soaked in lime water so that it 
compares more to ground hominy than to the 
American type of corn meal, which is unknown in 
Mexico. In former times the corn was all ground 
by hand on rough stones by the women, nearly 
eight hours being required to grind and make 
tortillas for a family of four or five. In the past 
fifteen years, however, machinery has gradually 
been installed all over Mexico for the grinding of 
the tortilla meal (called nixtamal) so that this tre- 
mendous waste of the women's energy has now been 
very largely obviated. The nature of the combina- 
tion of corn and lime requires that the meal be 
ground wet, and much of the flavor is lost if it is de- 

263 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

hydrated after grinding, although this is done and 
the dry tortilla meal can now be bought in Mexico 
and also in the United States. The preference for 
the wet meal, how^ever, brings the Mexican tortilla 
maker to the nixtamal mill early in the morning, 
either to carry her own corn to be ground or to pur- 
chase the product by the pound. The tortilla meal 
having been prepared, a small ball is patted into 
shape between the hands until it reaches the dimen- 
sions of a large pancake and the thickness of a piece 
'of cardboard. The lime water furnishes the only 
seasoning, and no salt and no shortening or leaven 
is used. Cooking is done on an ungreased hot 
plate, usually a sheet of iron heated over a charcoal 
brazier. 

Tortillas are cooked rapidly for about three 
minutes or until they are slightly browned. They 
are usually eaten hot, and when a peon woman 
carries food to her man at his work, a dozen fresh- 
cooked tortillas will be carried in a napkin to keep 
warm. The tortilla when cooked is not crisp and 
retains considerable of the original moisture, and 
can be reheated again and again with little loss in 
flavor. The tortilla is used by the peon (and by 
the middle-class Mexican as well when he is eating 
his beans) as a spoon, a twist of tortilla being skill- 
fully formed into a cup with which the mixture of 
beans and liquid sauce is conveyed to the mouth. 
The trick is more easily learned than the use of 
chopsticks, but the marvel to the foreigner on first 
seeing it accomplished is no less than is his wonder 
^t the skill of an Oriental. 

2f)3 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

While the tortilla is the staple and universal form, 
in which the Mexican absorbs his staff of life, corn 
is served in many other styles, but invariably the 
meal is prepared in identically the same way — that 
is, by soaking the grain in lune water, removing the 
tough "skin," and then grinding it. The most 
famous of the other forms in which corn is eaten is 
the tamal. " This is a roll of corn meal three inches 
long and an inch thick, with meat, raisins, or a 
soft sweetmeat in the center, rolled in corn husks 
and cooked by steaming. The meat is usually in a 
hot sauce of chiles, but the sweet tamales are fully 
as typical of Mexico and almost as much esteemed. 
The tamal is not a staple of the Mexican diet, as 
the foreigner is very likely to suppose. It is pre- 
pared for special occasions and is eaten with great 
relish at picnics, in the refreshment rooms of the 
parks and plazas, and at the meriendas, or afternoon 
tea parties. There are certain occasions when the 
tamal is absolutely indispensable for the celebration 
of a festival, and a tamalada, or ''party-for-eating- 
tamales," is an event looked forward to for many 
days. 

Another enjoyable specialty of the Mexican diet 
is the enchilada, which is made from an already 
cooked tortilla sprinkled with cheese, chopped 
onion, garlic, and hot chile sauce. The enchilada 
thus prepared is recooked on a dry skillet, rolled 
into a tube about an inch in diameter, and served 
piping hot. 

Other corn-meal foods of Mexico are cocoles, 
chavacanes, and pemol. Cocoles are cakes or biscuits 

264 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

of corn meal, half an inch in thickness and two 
inches in diameter. They contain some shortening 
and are served hot. Chavacanes, which are better 
known, are a mixture of the corn meal with shorten- 
ing and eggs. They are made up into flat round or 
square crackers, and cooked rapidly, as tortillas are. 
Pemol is a corn cake made from the same meal. In 
consistency it is not unlike Scotch shortbread, and 
it is made up in a variety of forms, from tiny cakes 
the size of a half dollar and a quarter of an inch in 
thickness, to large horseshoe loaves which are sold 
for special occasions and may be compared to 
German Kaffeekuchen. The gordas, or ''fat ones," 
are the Mexican sandwich, a thick layer of corn 
meal inclosing meat, chile, and frijoles, cooked, and 
eaten cold. Posole, corn meal in big balls, cooked 
and cooled, forms, like the gordas, a diet for long 
marches and particularly for long canoe trips 
where fires cannot be lighted. The Indians pro- 
vided mth this food are perfectly equipped for a 
trip of several days. The balls of meal are either 
eaten dry or mixed to a gruel with water scooped 
up from the boatside in the gourd or half coconut 
sheU which, with this food supply and his blanket, 
constitute the Indian's "outing equipment." 

The Mexican diet is famous the world over for 
its use of hot peppers, or chiles. The probable 
explanation is the need of an edge to the appetite 
and a stimulus to the formation of gastric juices 
to make up for the deficiencies in the rather insipid 
materials used in Mexican foods. The Mexican 
cook is a great coimoisseur in the use of chiles, of 

265 



THE PEOPLE OP MEXICO 

which there are many varieties. Each has a flavor 
that is quite distinct from its hotness; cayenne 
pepper and the so-called ''tabasco sauce/' whose 
chief virtue is their piquancy, are not used ex- 
tensively in Mexico, and where attempts are made 
by Mexican and other cooks outside of Mexico to 
approximate the Mexican dishes by the substitu- 
tion of cayenne for Mexican chiles, the result is a 
hopeless failure. In the preparation of most ''hot" 
sauces the Mexican cook uses two or three different 
sorts of chiles, combining them with onions, garlic, 
and, in the case of some of the most famous sauces, 
with chocolate and spices. The famous Mexican 
dish, mole, which is a rich sauce of a dark red color 
served with turkey or pork, is made by boiling 
three or four kinds of peppers with chocolate, 
garlic, spices, etc., for many hours, and the final 
touch is given by the sprinkling of chile seeds over 
the whole — the seeds being the hottest portion of 
any chile or pepper. In addition to the use of 
chiles in cooking, there are certain sorts, notably 
the little green chiles about an inch long and ex- 
tremely hot, which are chopped up with onion and 
spices and mixed with vinegar in uncooked sauces. 
These are used to give zest to any dish from huevos 
rancheros (eggs cooked in a piquant tomato sauce) 
to the beans at the end of a long and formal meal. 
Chiles are also eaten separately, the hottest of 
hot green ones being placed in little dishes on the 
table to be eaten raw, like olives, their resemblance 
to which harmless fruit in size and color is likely 
to deceive the unwary foreigner who sees his 

266 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

Mexican friends eating them unconcernedly — but 
he never again eats an ''olive" without careful 
examination. The large, sweet green chiles (like 
our mango-peppers, but much hotter) are often 
stuffed with chopped meat or soft Mexican cheese, 
the careful Mexican cook scalding the pepper and 
removing its tough outer membrane before stuffing. 
The stuffed chile is then dipped in beaten egg and 
fried — a delicious dish if the Mexican cook has 
not left too many of the hot seeds inside in order to 
flatter the taste of her compatriots. 

Another characteristic of the national diet is the 
use of fats and greases. Butter is considered ex- 
pensive and is used only by the well-to-do, the 
American imported brands being little dearer than 
good Mexican butter. Lard is also costly, so that 
many of the typical Mexican dishes are made and 
depend for their flavor upon the use of mutton and 
beef fat. The upper-class Mexican housewife finds 
that her servants crave fats to such an extent that 
they will eat even lard just as it comes from the 
market, a fact due, probably, to the lack of shorten- 
ing in their favorite corn and beans. 

The typical Mexican is very little interested in 
the vegetables in his menu. It is said that when 
the first Chinese colonists came to Mexico their 
vegetable gardens were the sights of the towns 
where they settled. Around the capital and other 
cities there are many truck gardens which serve 
the Europeanized Mexicans and the foreigners, but 
even counting the squashes, which are raised in 
astonishing quantities, the onions, which are of 

367 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

course esteemed, owing to their strong flavor, and 
tomatoes, which are needed in the preparation of 
many dishes, the total production of these truck 
gardens is extremely small in proportion to the 
population served. The ordinary salads are raised 
for the upper classes, but even the native aguacate 
(alligator pear or avocado) is used more as a butter 
than as a salad. The Spaniards introduced the 
chick pea or garbanzo into Mexico, and in certain 
sections, notably on the west coast, this deUcious 
bean is extensively used, but as its food properties 
are apparently identical with those of the frijol or 
Mexican bean, it adds no variety to the diet. 
There is perhaps a growing use of vegetables, but 
the canned or tinned goods imported from the 
United States or France seem to be preferred. 
Potatoes in Mexico are seldom good unless they 
are imported. The native cuisine does not confer 
the crown of gastronomic necessity which is given 
them in other lands, and the Mexican truck farmer, 
even if he plants them, seems to resent the time they 
take to grow, and digs them up when they are mere 
buttons. Rice is common and takes the honored 
place of potatoes with the meat course of the Mexi- 
can dinner. In its cooking the Mexicans are no 
less artists than the Chinese, the grains coming out 
firm and dry, for it is cooked in scalding grease and 
water; this cooking, and tomatoes and a dehcate 
seasoning, give Mexican rice a flavor unexcelled in 
any cuisine. 

Tinned delicacies have been in use in Mexico for 
many years, for foods imported from abroad are 

268 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

esteemed by those Mexicans of the upper classes 
who have traveled, and in general by those who 
affect European manners. In addition, the diffi- 
culty of obtaining a variety of food in the hot 
country where there are no refrigerator cars, and 
no food is raised save the actual staples, increases 
the market for tinned goods. Danish butter, as 
well as American tinned meat, fish, and vegetables, 
are part of the regular diet of the middle and upper 
classes in all of the country south of Mexico City; 
in Yucatan, where very little fresh food is raised, 
the tinned goods imported from abroad give almost 
the only variety of the diet. Throughout Mexico 
tinned salmon and, interestingly enough, sardines, 
have long been popular with every class, including 
the peons, who consume ludicrously large quantities 
of sardines at festival times when they are spending 
money freely. 

Fruit is seldom used as a part of a meal in Mexico, 
but is eaten freely between meals. Bananas, 
oranges, pineapples, and melons are common, as 
well as other native fruits, subtropical and tropical, 
such as the zapote, the fruit of the chicle, or chewing- 
gum, tree, the tuna, or prickly pear, the fruit of the 
nopal cactus, the chirimoya, a relative of the paw- 
paw, the pitahaya, also a cactus fruit. Excellent 
oranges, limes (called limones), and lemons (which 
are limas) are native, and some grapefruit is 
grown on imported trees. There are few good 
native apples in Mexico, but American boxed 
apples are imported and are sold in most of the 
cities. 

269 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The Mexican of whatever class usually ''drinks 
something" with his naeals. In the country sec- 
tions where pulque is made, the low-class peon 
hardly considers any meal worth having without a 
big glass of it. His breakfast is usually taken with- 
out this beverage, but in its place he often has a 
small glass of native brandy or alcohol, which he 
pours into his coffee. This drinking undoubtedly 
has an as yet undetermined, but probably very 
great, effect on the general digestive health of the 
Mexican of the lower class, for the tradition is very 
strong, and many of the American plantations in 
the hot country followed native custom by issuing a 
drink of aguardiente, or native rum, to their workers 
each morning before they went to the fields. There 
is also much adulteration of liquor in Mexico, gov- 
ermnent inspectors having reported that many 
saloon keepers go so far as to mix nitric acid with 
the tequila, or native brandy, which they dispense. 
A ''warm feeling going down" is an undeniable 
result, but the effect on the digestive system is 
something not to be discounted in any discussion 
of the poor assmiilative ability of the Mexican 
stomach. 

The upper classes use wine almost as much as 
do the French and Italians, most of this being 
imported, although there are some fairly good table 
wines made in Mexico. Cognac is used as an 
appetizer as well as with coffee, but mixed drinks, 
and even whisky, are used only where foreign in- 
fluence has made itself felt. 

Coffee and chocolate are the two nationally 

270 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

popular "soft" beverages. Coffee is made by 
combining a concentrated essence with hot milk or 
with hot water for the after-dinner demi-tasse. 
The extract is usually homemade, being prepared 
by the drip method, poured through the fine 
grounds again and again. A very strong essence 
results, and in the country a wine bottle full of 
this cold, syrupy coffee is placed in the middle of 
the table and the guests themselves pour out the 
quantity they wish, usually about a quarter or a 
third of the cup, filling with sizzling-hot milk. 

Chocolate is prepared by the Spanish method, 
which includes a steady "whipping" of the boiling 
chocolate, sugar, water, and milk with a wooden 
beater whirled between the two hands. The result 
is an extremely rich and very delicious mixture 
which can be thinned, if desired, with hot milk or 
cream, though this outrage is usually committed 
only by foreigners. When taken in the proper 
Mexican fashion the chocolate is sopped up with 
the white breads, sweetened or unsweetened, which 
accompany breakfast and the merienda, the oc- 
casions when this drink is served. Mexican choco- 
late is mixed with cinnamon before it is marketed, 
a method which was imported by the Spaniards, 
and substituted the older Aztec system of flavoring 
it with vanilla. The mixture is very good for 
cooking, but makes the chocolate unpalatable for 
eating, as it is not sweetened in the cake. Thus 
even in the tropics, where "home grown" chocolate 
can be bought in this form at every village, it is 
not used as a food, as might be expected among a 

18 271 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

people who certainly appreciate the flavor and 
nourishing quahties of the cacao bean. 

Tea is a drink which most Mexicans do not like, 
and relatively small quantities are sold. An in- 
fusion of orange leaves and local drinks brewed 
from herbs are used in limited quantities, but little 
imported tea is drunk save by those of European 
manners. Quantities of nonintoxicating drinks, 
typical among them very sweet alleged fruit syrups 
diluted with plain water, are consumed, though not 
with meals. The Mexican bottling companies 
make various sodas of the usual varieties and ship 
bottled spring water all over the country, the public 
waters not being used for drinking by those who can 
afford the reasonably priced mineral water. 

Food in a Mexican household is invariably bought 
from day to day, even to the one-centavo package 
of salt which tops the market basket. This is due, 
to a certain extent, to the fact that if there is a 
large supply of food on hand the Mexican cook will 
invariably be wasteful and is as likely as not to 
cook three different kinds of meat for a single meal 
if they happen to be on hand and she has no other 
instructions. The Mexican housekeeper of the 
upper classes very seldom does her own buying, 
even though she may feel that the ''commission" 
collected by her cook is improper, for the prices in 
the market places are never fixed and the cook is 
in a much better position to bargain than the fine 
lady. The cook in a Mexican household is a person 
of no mean importance, and she will seldom, if her 
purchases are bulky, carry them home herself, but 

272 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

will hire a cardador, or porter, with a great round 
basket on his head to follow her home in state. 

The life of the servants in a Mexican menage is 
distinct from that of the family, even while the 
feudal and paternal attitude has to be maintained. 
The division is no more distinctly manifested than 
in the matter of eating. The lower-class Mexican, 
raised on his diet of corn, beans, and chiles, does 
not, when he first joins an upper class household, 
find any satisfaction in the food which is served to 
his masters. If he is given plenty of coffee and 
plenty of grease in which to cook his favorite foods, 
he cares nothing for the more delicate viands which 
go to the family table. In this he has been skill- 
fully encouraged through many centuries of caste 
life in Mexico. Mexican servants are paid their 
salaries, and in addition are given a definite per 
diem, usually twenty-five centavos or less, for their 
meals. This does not by any means prevent the 
use of the food which is prepared for the main table 
unless the housekeeper is extremely watchful, but 
what is taken will be largely meat, fats, and gravies, 
which they will reseason to suit their less delicate 
appetites. Above all things in their food low-class 
Mexicans desire quantity — and grease. 

The fresh-food distribution system of Mexico is 

largely independent of that helpful adjunct of 

civihzation — the middleman. Except for meat in 

the capital and a few of the large cities, your cook 

buys your food from hands only once removed from 

the producer. The system of food handhng in 

Mexico City is typical of the entire country. Most 

273 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

of the vegetables are raised on the so-called "floating 
gardens" along the Viga Canal, southwest of the 
city. This canal, once a part of the drainage 
system of Mexico, is about five miles long, and 
along its edges, joined to the main stream by narrow 
canals, are many acres of little gardens, heavily 
fertilized, where corn and beans, squash, onions, 
chiles, and acres of poppies, pansies, and other 
flowers are raised together. These little farms are 
owned or rented by native Indians, the most pic- 
turesque inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, and, 
incidentally, usually the cleanest. These producers 
gather their crops, load them into canoes, in turn 
transfer the produce to large scows in the main 
canal, and themselves pole down to the city in the 
night. At the landing place, not far from the 
center of the capital, the produce is sold by the 
men who raised it directly to the market dealers. 

The Viga market is the only approximation of a 
central wholesale market which Mexico enjoys, and 
prices are fixed by lively bargaining and not by 
any czars of distribution. The purchasers from the 
markets hire carts, public coaches, or human car- 
riers to transport their new stock to the market 
places, where, in stalls rented from the city, they 
deal directly, with much vociferous bargaining, 
with your cook. The Viga market opens at dawn, 
and by seven or eight o'clock the entire shipment of 
the day is sold and has practically all been delivered 
to the market places in the center of the city. 
There your cook, or you yourself if you are seeking 
adventure, will spend a happy two hours going from 

274 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

stall to stall, inquiring prices of the squatting 
market women or the cigarette-smoking market 
men, engaging in violent altercations and finally 
purchasing at prices which are very genuinely the 
result of the stable economic forces of supply and 
demand. 

The milk supply of Mexico City is handled in 
only a little more complicated fashion. It is 
brought in from the outlying haciendas in great 
wagons and is sold at wholesale by the drivers from 
the farms. It is then transported to the markets 
or to the little stores which encircle the market 
plaza, and there is sold to the consumer. The 
ordinaiy Mexican milk is thin and poor, for until 
the last few years of Diaz, no high-grade stock was 
imported. In the first decade of the century some 
fine herds were established, and in Mexico City a 
limited quantity of good milk could be procured 
through large dairying concerns, chiefly American. 
Other cities were not so fortunate, but good cows 
thrive except in the hot country, and conditions 
were improving. Government inspection of milk 
was attempted, but no careful Mexican housewife 
uses milk that has not been boiled. 

Meat in Mexico City and generally in each town 
is now all killed in the government - supervised 
slaughter house. There it is inspected and thence 
distributed to the dealers. There is some refrigera- 
tion, but practically all the meat is brought into 
Mexican cities on the hoof by the buyers who have 
purchased it in the country, and killed where it is 
consumed. A few years ago an American company 

275 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

erected a modern slaughter house at Uruapam on 
the edge of the rich cattle country of Michoacan 
and Guerrero, and attempted to educate the 
Mexican people up to refrigerated meat, but this 
was unsuccessful, for the Mexican cook prefers 
fresh-killed beef, even though her master knows 
that the refrigerated product is tenderer and more 
delicious. Meat is dispensed at retail in some of 
the market places, but as a rule is sold in butcher 
shops near by. Practically none of these have 
refrigerators, and the meat is hung out in the open 
air, unscreened, and kept fresh only by the circu- 
lation of the air which enters the shops through the 
barred doors and windows, which are always open, 
night and day. The Mexican butcher is not a 
particularly skillful cutter of meat, and a mse cook 
can get the very finest cuts, with the bones removed, 
for almost the same price per pound that the less 
intelligent peon Avomen "will pay for a shank bone. 
The filet or tenderloin is the most esteemed portion 
of the beef, and is ahnost invariably sold separately, 
though, again, the unwary purchaser is just as 
likely to get the faux-filet or a carefully shaped 
length of the round at the price of the true filet. 

The meat used in Mexico is practically none of 
it raised from true beef cattle. The old tradition 
was that only cow meat was desirable, and that 
even the flesh of steers (oxen are used extensively 
as draft animals in Mexico) was not so desirable. 
Bull meat is strong in flavor and very tough, and 
is not bought where anything else can be obtained. 
The animals killed in the bull fights are considered 

276 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

poisoned, owing to the '^ heated blood" which came 
from the wrath which they were displaying at the 
time of their death. This meat is either not used 
at all or is given to prisoners and soldiers. No 
horse meat is eaten in Mexico, at least not con- 
sciously. The "lamb" is mostly goat. Pork is 
much esteemed, but foreigners who note that the 
pig is one of the chief scavengers of Mexico, do not, 
as a rule, eat Mexican pork, although this prejudice 
is probably as ungrounded as the native prejudice 
against the meat of the steer. The Mexican market 
consumes the entire anunal, including lungs and 
entrails, for food, and at the time that an American 
company was in charge of the packing house in 
Mexico City it was found necessary to import 
from the United States the skins for the sausages 
which were made out of the renderings of the pork, 
because the prices paid by the natives for the 
entrails of the animals made it unprofitable to use 
the native product for sausage skins. 

Poultry and fish are both popular in Mexico, 
although they have always been relatively expen- 
sive. Almost the only fish which is edible in 
Mexico is that from the deep sea, as the fresh-water 
streams have long since been exhausted. Fish in 
the interior towns, therefore, commands a price 
as high as or higher than meat, and is considered a 
special delicacy. Poultry is always bought alive 
at the market and is killed and dressed at home, 
and, as in parts of the United States, is often cooked 
before the animal heat has got out of the flesh. 

In the tropics of Mexico there is still some wild 
277 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

game, and wild turkey is sometimes to be bought in 
the hot-country cities, but in the centers of popu- 
lation game has been completely exhausted, with 
the single exception of wild duck. In winter the 
great lakes of the Valley are hterally covered with 
these beautiful birds, who arrive with the fall and 
remain till their migration northward in the spring. 
The market prices of wild duck in Mexico are 
pleasingly low, but the birds are killed in ways 
which outrage all the instincts of the sportsman. 
One method is by volleys from guns set in regular 
batteries. Ancient weapons of every sort, and 
including guns made by hand from gaspipe, are 
used. Sometimes a particularly diabolical inventor 
wiU prepare three batteries, one of a dozen guns 
aimed across the level of the water, another at a 
slight angle, and a third at a high angle, so that 
after the first shot has made its kill and the other 
birds are rising, the second battery is fired, bringing 
down more, and finally the third catches most of 
the birds which have escaped the fil^st two. 

Another method is more picturesque and also 
appeals more to the economical Indian, as it costs 
him no investment for powder and shot. He will 
hollow out a pumpkin or a large squash, stick it 
over his head, with spaces cut for the eyes, and 
wade up to his neck out into a flock of ducks on the 
surface of the water. By great patience, and 
thanks to the appearance of the harmless gourd 
floating on the water, the Indian can often approach 
the flock, and as he stands among them up to his 
shoulders in water, his head covered by the gourd, 

378 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

he can, or claims he can, take one duck at a time 
by its feet as it floats on the surface, drag it below 
the water, wring its neck, and fasten it to his belt. 
This, at least, is the tale which the Indians them- 
selves tell, and although it may well be a figment of 
the imagination, it indicates the lengths to which 
the Indian will go in his efforts to acquire some- 
thing without the expenditure of capital. 

In general, the distribution of food in Mexico 
may be said to be almost archaic. During the 
unhappy days of revolution and under Carranza 
and his immediate successors this condition gave 
rise to the most colossal speculation in foodstuffs, 
beginning with the "generals" who controlled 
freight traffic and forced the farmers to sell their 
produce at a low figure, to be transported and sold 
for the "generals'" account at a huge profit in the 
cities, and extending down the line to the bandits 
who stole or destroyed the crops, and the town 
merchants and speculators who took advantage of 
the intermittent shortages. One of the great 
sources of suffering diu-ing this period was the dis- 
organization of distribution as a result of the revo- 
lution, but the situation was only an aggravation 
of that which has always existed in Mexico, where 
the price of so staple a product as corn has in normal 
times often varied 500 per cent in relatively neigh- 
boring sections. 

The prices of foods are discussed elsewhere.^ 
They are the combined result of poor distribution 
and the eternal imminence of famine, a specter 

^ See part ii, chap, xi, p. 364. 

279 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

which always hovers over Mexico and time and 
again has reduced her population to misery and 
destruction.^ In part the varying food prices are 
due also to local conditions, for even in large towns 
the markets are often lacking in such staples as 
eggs or even beans and corn. This seems traceable 
to the custom of the Indian and peon producers, 
who send their goods to market only when they 
need money, while even the hacendados are often 
more likely to consult their own convenience in 
such matters than to follow even the demands of a 
rising market. 

Wordy battles have been waged by experts and 
by amateurs over the nutritive value of the Mexican 
diet. Doing heavy work, the peon can get along 
perfectly well on beans and tortillas, with meat, 
either fresh or dried, only once a week. The allow- 
ance on the most successful plantations has seldom 
included anything besides beans, corn, coffee, sugar, 
and lard, with meat once or twice a week to the 
extent of half a pound or less per person. Men 
of the middle and upper classes, moreover, have 
mental distractions and some physical exercise 
which helps with the assimilation of their heavy 
diet. 

On the other hand, Mexican women and children 
are notoriously unhealthy. Those of the upper 
classes overeat not only of their exceptionally 
clogging diet, but also in the matter of sweets, so 
that they often grow fat or sallow in early maturity. 

^ See part ii, chap, i, pp. 148-151, for discussion of this result of 
Mexico's cliraatic conditions. 

280 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

The lack of fruits and green vegetables seems to be 
very evident here, and the absence of variety in 
food may be largely responsible for the poor health 
of the women. 

'Much of the heavy infant mortality is so obvi- 
ously due to the habits of eating allowed and en- 
couraged in children that it need only be mentioned 
here. The low-class Mexican mother thinks that 
her child can eat a thick, greasy soup mth tortillas 
cut up in it as soon as he is taken from the breast, 
or before, and, indeed, gives him a tortilla or a stick 
of sugar cane to assist him in teething. The young 
Mexican child early begins to eat hot chiles, with 
effects on his digestive tract which can be under- 
stood by any foreigner who has suffered from this 
violent and unaccustomed stunulant. 

It seems more likely that the undernourishment 
of the adult Mexican of the lower class is due to 
actual lack of a sufficient quantity of food. It may 
be that the continued excessive use of hot chiles 
and of liquor have deadened the nerves of the 
stomach so that need of food is not indicated 
promptly by a sense of hunger, or that the chiles 
themselves create a feeling of temporary satisfac- 
tion on an incompletely nourishing meal rather 
than merely stimulating the formation of the gastric 
juices and the appetite, as they are supposed to do, 
or that the continued use of chiles may have re- 
duced the individual's digestive vitality so that 
he does not get the full food value from what he 
does eat. 

However, the simpler explanation is that the 

281 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

native apathy makes the peon a very poor pro- 
vider, for there is real ground for the tradition 
that he will not Avork except when he actually 
needs food. Undoubtedly, in the face of famine 
or a scarcity of food within the family's reach, the 
Mexican peons, men, women, and children, accept 
what seems to them the inevitable with a stolidity 
which is exasperating, to say the least, to the more 
enterprising white men. If he is given food he 
eats it with avidity, and on the plantations where 
rations are given him and he is not required to 
provide them, the quality of his work and his morale 
are always excellent. One report regarding Mexican 
labor on American railways says that they "live on 
very little when they draw rations, but demand a 
liberal diet (usually including fresh meat) when 
boarded. . . . Contractors and foremen find the 
efficiency of Mexican laborers so much greater 
when boarded that it pays to give them regular 
meals instead of rations, even though higher wages 
must be paid to compensate them for the increased 
cost of living." ^ 

Similar conditions are found by careful students 
of Mexican efficiency in Mexico itself. One Ameri- 
can employer of Mexican labor reports receiving a 
gang of workmen who seemed to be perfectly well, 
but were apathetic, and giving them all the coffee 
they could drink, and all the beans and tortillas 
they could eat. They literally gorged themselves 
at first, showing a desire for nourishment which was 

1 Victor S. Clark, "Mexican Labor in the United States" in 
Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 78, p. 480. 

282 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

astonishing and somewhat unexpected even by the 
experienced employer. He kept them well fed for 
many weeks, and made it a rule to weigh them at 
intervals, noting with considerable pleasure that 
his generosity was improving their health and, as 
he figm'ed it, bringing him in definite returns in 
increased production. An amusing corollary to the 
story is that the Indians, although getting more to 
eat than they had ever had in their hves, and 
working under excellent conditions, contrived to 
start a first-class strike on the place, and it was 
finally discovered that the only complaint was that 
they objected to being "weighed like pigs." 

The Mexican diet of corn, beans, and fat is gen- 
erally approved by dieticians, and practical sup- 
port of their theories is lent by the fact that the 
country peons who get Httle liquor, but eat their 
regular corn, beans, and fats, even without meat, 
rarely have digestive disorders, but that these are 
common to the city dwellers, who can satisfy their 
appetite for hot, greasy masses of food which they 
find cooked up and sold to them in the fondas and 
on the streets — concocted of one knows not what 
forms of decaying vegetable and animal matter, 
covered with the hot, spicy gravy. The greater 
ease with which liquor is obtained in the cities 
should not be lost sight of in this connection. 

Some observers of Mexican life find their text for 
dissertations on Mexican malnutrition in the fact 
that the Mexican eats rather strange, and to other 
races unpalatable, foods. The fact that he enjoys 

the large white grub which lives in the maguey 

2§3 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

plant when this worm is cooked in boiling fat, the 
fact that he relishes the insect or fish eggs which 
are dragged from the bottom of lakes and that he 
will eat iguana or lizard and even monkey meat 
with relish, are all taken as indications of the hunger 
which once assailed the natives, for, as one observer 
put it, ''this perversion of the natural appetite can 
have originated only in the torturing pangs of an 
acute hunger." 

Summing up the dietary situation in Mexico, we 
find that the foods most craved by the Mexican 
are extremely heavy, although they are well 
balanced as to nourishing properties, corn and beans 
and fat supplying practically all the needs of the 
human body. There is a climatic uniformity in the 
appetite for this type of food, for the diet of the 
upper classes shows that they enjoy foods which 
are more delicate in flavor, but which have much 
the same properties and proportions as the diet of 
the Indians and peons. We find that the same diet 
is eaten by both men and women and, unfortunately, 
by the children also; that the effect upon the men 
is satisfactory, particularly so far as they are 
engaged in labor, but that the women are either 
subject to diseases of the digestive tract or are over- 
fed with sweets, unhealthily fat, and prematurely 
aged. The heavy infant mortality in Mexico is 
undoubtedly due in part to the injurious feeding 
of this same heavy diet to infants and children, 
but although there has been some marked improve- 
ment in the matter of child mortality where Ameri- 
can companies or doctors have changed the chil- 

284 



MEXICO'S FOODS 

dren's diet, even this extensive indication of the 
unsuitability of the Mexican dietary for certain 
members of her population is less of a criticism of 
the diet itself than of the intelligence of the mothers. 
That Mexicans are often undernourished seems 
recognized, however, and this undernourishment 
seems traceable more to digestive disorders resulting 
from the excessive use of the stimulants of chile 
and liquor than to the food itself, although the 
poverty and apathy of the lower classes and the 
cruelty of a climate which makes food raising diffi- 
cult have had much to do with the natives' not 
getting enough of the foods which they naturally 
crave. 



VIII 

CLOTHING 

THOSE who seek to find in Mexico signs of an 
identification with modern culture encounter 
but cold comfort in the native standards of dress. 
The Mexican male, like a true barbarian, is the 
bird of gaudy plumage, and the female a modest 
brown sparrow— the nest builder, the worker, the 
squaw. As in every country where an indigenous 
population supports upper classes of more or less 
international culture, the country's sartorial pecul- 
iarities are, however, found only below the upper 
strata of society. Wherever the national dress is 
worn by the upper classes it is with much the 
attitude of European aristocrats when, at certain 
festivals, they put on the hereditary dress of the 
peasants. In the colonial period, and into the 
days of General Diaz, the sons of high-class families 
did often appear in the charro costmne of silver- 
trimmed doeskin, with tinseled hat, peaked and 
broad-brimmed, and the brilliant colored zerape. 
This was, of course, not their usual attire, but they 
wore it as youthful Cafifornia millionaires will 
appear from time to time in chaps, flannel shirt, and 
bandanna. 

286 



CLOTHING 

When one thinks of the Mexican one invariably 
pictures this charro costume. It was originally 
worn by the cowboj^s, but later developed as typical 
of the Mexican countrynaan, and was perpetuated 
in the official use of the rurales, or Federal police. 
The most typical feature of the charro outfit is the 
great sombrero, or hat, made of heavy felt, black, 
brown, or gray, with a peaked crown twelve to 
fourteen inches high, and a broadly curving brim 
eight to ten inches wide, embroidered in gilt or 
silver tinsel. The coat is a short bolero jacket 
extending only to the waist, and usually em- 
broidered in tinsel. A soft shirt, loose about the 
neck, is fastened with a bright necktie. The 
trousers, supported on the hips by a brilliant-hued 
twisted sash, are of the same material as the coat, 
fitting as tightly as is physically possible, flaring 
slightly at the bottom, where they are buttoned 
skin-tight for about ten inches above the pointed 
leather shoes. The trousers are trinmied with 
silver braid and have silver buttons along the 
sides, the buttons at the waist and at the bottom of 
the leg being of use, the rest purely ornamental. 
In material the suit was, in its perfectly typical 
form, of soft-tanned leather, gray or brown, and 
elaborately embroidered, the gray in silver and the 
brown in gold. The leather was in later years 
substituted by fine or heavy cloth, and some variety 
in color was brought in, even white being affected 
by the dandies when they rode out on horseback on 
their elaborately tooled and silver-studded saddles. 

This costume is to be found all over Mexico to- 

19 287 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

day among the rancher o class, the most typical of 
the m.estizo groups. It remains the Mexican 
national costmne, but as time has passed fewer and 
fewer of the Mexicans use it. Twenty years ago 
in Mexico City every driver of a public carriage 
wore a broad-brimmed felt sombrero, but to-day 
one would have difficulty in finding one in the 
capital. In those days the coachmen in the cities, 
and others belonging to their class in the towns, 
wore short bolero jackets and tight trousers, 
untrimmed. Now, with the advance of American 
and, later, Mexican ready-made clothes of European 
type, this survival has passed. The Mexican na- 
tional costume is becoming largely a tradition in 
the cities, but a tradition which, happily for the 
picturesque side of Mexico, still finds expression in 
the countryside. 

While for many generations the Mexican man 
had this national dress, the woman of similar class 
was garbed with a drab sameness which, though it 
marked her social status, still lacked almost every- 
thing that was at all picturesque. Her dresses 
were, and still are, long and flaring, made usually 
of a cotton print, and almost untrimmed. Only the 
headdress could be said to be typical — a scarf of 
black merino, in the class corresponding to the men 
who wear the charro costume, and in the lower 
classes the reboso of a soft blue color which has been 
Mexican for centuries. 

If the so-called Mexican dress has been disap- 
pearing of late years, the clothing of the peon and 
of the Indian has remained ahnost unchanged since 

288 



CLOTHING 

early days. This consists of a hat of plaited straw, 
the crown round and low, the big brim curving up- 
ward practically to the height of the crown, a 
coUarless shirt, white manta (the coarse native 
muslin) pantaloons of the general cut of pajama 
trousers, held in place by a scarf of red cotton wound 
round and round the waist, with the ends tucked in, 
and the feet in sandals of the simplest pattern. 
The costume is completed by a zerape of wool about 
the size of the blanket of a single bed, folded twice 
lengthwise, and carried over the left shoulder during 
the day, and at night, or when it is cold, wrapped 
about the shoulders, covering mouth and nose as 
well. Sometimes there is a coat of white cotton, 
but this is found only in the tropics, where the 
zerape is not always carried. The trousers, when 
long, are usually so wide that, as they flap, it seems 
that they touch both toe and heel. Sometimes, 
however, they are cut short at the knee, and usually 
when the peon is at work the wide trousers are 
rolled up until the full leg is bare. 

The peon women dress in dark cotton, the waist 
being almost invariably covered by the reboso, 
which is used as a sling for carrying the inevitable 
baby, perched behind or on the left arm. The 
long black hair of these women is plaited with 
strips of red cotton cloth or tape, usually two 
braids hanging down the back. They seldom wear 
sandals except when on long marches, often going 
barefoot even in the city streets. 

Although the Spaniards introduced pantaloons 

and shirt, the dress of the ancient inhabitants of 

289 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Mexico seems to have had a part in the origin of the 
typical costume of the lower classes of to-day. The 
earUest forms of dress were, of course, of diied skins, 
these being displaced as time went on by tanned 
and prepared leather, cut and sewed, and then by 
cloth made of maguey and palm fiber. The Aztec 
and related tribes were wearing cotton when the 
Spaniards came, the fineness of some of that used 
by the nobles being remarked by the conquerors. 

The costmne of the Aztec men consisted of two 
garments, one the maxtli (breech cloth is our only 
approximation), which, in the highest classes, was 
twenty-four feet long and nine inches wide, so that 
dressing was no minor operation. The other gar- 
ment was the timatli, or mantle, the precursor of the 
modern zerape, a four-foot square of cotton or 
fiber, worn with two corners knotted or clasped on 
breast or shoulder. 

The Indian women wore a short chemise, or 
huipil, reaching barely to the waist, and a cuetil, or 
skirt, tight fitting, of cotton or other fabric, reaching 
to halfway between knees and ankles. Sometimes 
additional overdresses similar to the huipil, but 
longer, were worn, ornamented with fringes and 
tassels. All of these garments, including the men's 
breech cloths, were often embroidered and tinted 
elaborately, according to the piu-se of the wearer. 
The dress of the nobles differed from that of the 
peasants only in quality and ornamentation. 

Survivals of some of these costumes persist, those 

of the ancient-lineaged Otomis being probably the 

purest, the women to-day wearing garments like 

290 



CLOTHING 

those just described, and, rarely, the older men a 
wide breech cloth and diminutive zerape with a slit 
in the middle, so that it is worn over the head, its 
width hardly passing the shoulders, its length little 
more than to the waist in front and back, or some- 
times sewed into half sleeves, the long ends belted in 
at the waist. 

To describe the Mexican of to-day, we find that 
the social significance of his costume begins with his 
hat and ends only with his shoes. The peon's coarse, 
plaited, round-crowned head covering evolves, when 
he becomes a free laborer, into a high-peaked straw 
or felt sombrero, increasing in elaborateness as his 
purse allows. His hat is truly his pride, the mark 
of his grandeur and the expression of his self-esteem. 
A miner stripped to a breech cloth will still appear 
with a great peaked hat in which he carries his 
cigarettes and his matches, his lunch, and even his 
money, and which serves as well for a protection 
against falling stones when he is working under- 
ground. The city and farm laborer may not have 
such a fancy hat, but it is usually peaked, and 
therein he also carries most of his belongings, even 
down to a few tortillas and a piece of meat. When, 
in climbing the social scale, the peaked sombrero 
disappears, it is replaced by a thick, broad felt 
hat which may have been designed by American 
manufacturers for their Western trade thirty years 
ago, but which has now assumed a form and use 
which are essentially Mexican. Above this plane 
the derby, the panama, and the convenient straw 
hat of American manufacture eliminate the dis- 

291 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

tinctions in male headgear, but it is difficult to 
wean even the most modernized mestizo away from 
his ponderous and depressing black felt hat with 
its heavy wide brim and its thick crown. 

The outer covering of the Mexican is typified by 
the zerape, whose manufacture developed one of 
the most interesting phases of the native crafts, the 
weaving of fine and beautiful fabrics on the hand 
loom. In the early days the zerapes of Zacatecas 
and Saltillo were famous for their fineness, for their 
designs and color, and for their impermeability to 
water. To-day one will find but few of these 
ancient zerapes, in many cases even the designs 
having been abandoned in the wholesale manu- 
facture of blankets patterned on European steamer 
rugs, and still more often on the American Indian's 
machine-made red blanket decorated only with a 
pair of black bars at either end. The beautiful 
hand-woven zerapes are still worn and prized, how- 
ever, by those who affect the charro costiune. 
Even when one reaches the plane where the black 
felt hat first appears, the zerape is still found as the 
overcoat, though by this time it has become 
sobered to a dull gray or dark blue, reminiscent of 
the shawls of the Victorian era. 

As a wrap, the zerape is swung about the shoul- 
ders, muffling the face, an adaptation doubtless 
made from the Spanish cloak, the trick of swinging 
it so that it will stay without holding being attained 
only after long practice. Only the shoulders and 
face are covered, and on a chilly day, or even while 
sleeping on a night which is none too warm, the 

292 



CLOTHING 

peon swathes his head in his zerape, while his bare 
legs are freely and imfeeUngly exposed to the 
weather. 

The suits of t'he Mexican men in the upper 
classes follow the styles of London and New York. 
They are usually made by native tailors, although 
ready-made suits have been imported from the 
United States, and are made by some concerns in 
Mexico itself. In the time of General Diaz, how- 
ever, European woolens paid comparatively low 
duty and labor was cheap, so that tailored clothing 
was more economical than any that could be im- 
ported from the United States. The advantages of 
style and cut are with the imported ready-made 
suits, however, for the Mexican tailor, working on 
his fine Em-opean fabrics, usually produces a botch 
of bunched-up material without finish or style. 

As we go down the social scale the coat becomes 
shorter, approaching the traditional bolero type, 
and the waistcoat becomes a purely utihtariau 
garment. The Mexican tailor, in fact, is very 
hkely to make the trousers extremely high-waisted, 
with the idea of displacing the waistcoat by the 
wide belt of the trousers — a Spanish adaptation. 
The trousers are often made tight across the hips, 
even though they may be straight instead of tight- 
fitting below. The tight-fitting trousers are, how- 
ever, still popular with the artisans and with the 
town Indians, whom local ordinances now usually 
require to appear in trousers instead of white 
pantaloons. 

The city ordinances referred to were passed with 
293 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the idea that the sensible and convenient white 
cotton ''pajamas" were not decent, but the for- 
eigner contemplates with something of repugnance 
the spectacle of the clean Indian passing through 
the city streets in a pair of tight-fitting trousers 
which he has rented in one of the subm^bs and which 
he will return, to be used by another, when he 
leaves the town. 

The foot covering of the Mexican runs from 
nothing but his own calloused skin to imported 
American shoes. The Mexican sandal is of very 
simple design, the thong of rawhide being attached 
to four wire staples at the sides of the thick leather 
sole. The thong does not pass between the toes, 
and the sandal, or guaracha, is in reality little more 
than a piece of leather or woven fiber fastened to 
the bottom of the foot by leather strips passing over 
the instep and around the heel. Most of the shoes 
worn in Mexico are imported, but the Mexicans 
have manufactured small quantities of shoes for 
many years, chiefly from the poorly tanned and 
ill-smelling native leather. The typical native shoe 
is long and pointed, without a tip, and usually 
with elastics in the sides. 

The costumes of the women follow similar caste 
lines. The upper classes wear French hats, and 
differ from the customs of other communities 
largely in the wearing of rather more elaborate 
headgear for ordinary occasions than would be 
chosen by the European or American woman. 
The use of hats now extends quite far down the 
scale. The Mexican lady wears the Spanish lace 

294 



CLOTHING 

head covering (,the mantilla and the Sevillana) only 
upon special occasions, although in the colonial 
period they were the proper and expected style. 
The mantilla, for instance, is worn on certain cere- 
monial, days of worship in the Church, notably 
Good Friday, but the Sevillana, a suitable covering 
for the elaborate feminine coiffure, is now almost 
unknown except as an evening scarf. The Mexican 
lady, when she drives, now wears a European hat, 
where fifty years ago the women of her class ap- 
peared with an elaborate coiffure and the light lace 
Sevillana as its covering. 

The mantilla is a scarf three or four yards long, 
and at most one yard wide, of black or white sillc 
or linen lace. When worn, formally, it is gathered 
in at the top and fastened to the hair. The Sevil- 
lana is a much lighter and smaller piece of lace, 
also black or white, a yard or little more in length, 
and diamond shaped, so that the top of the head is 
covered and the tapering ends fall gracefully over 
the shoulders. The ends of the mantilla are folded 
loosely about the neck, but the Sevillana often hangs 
undraped. 

The use of hats has, with Mexican ladies, prac- 
tically replaced the beautiful laces, bat the black 
merino scarf is still the sign of the lower middle- 
class woman, the wife of the artisan and clerk. 
This is worn folded about the head tightly and 
wrapped about the neck, a style suggestive of the 
East. The blue reboso of the lower-class women is 
much longer than the black merino scarf, and in 
shape is very much like the mantilla, which, how- 

295 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

ever, it does not approximate in any other way. 
There is a typical weave of this garment which 
alternates white and blue threads and gives a pale 
tone to a fabric which is, in reality, dark and sub- 
stantial. The reboso is made of cotton, but it is 
also manufactured in its typical pattern in silk, in 
which form it is used by upper-class women as a 
very convenient shoulder wrap. The peon woman 
wears it almost invariably over the head, and at 
the same time as a sling for the baby, or even for 
the day's purchases at the market. 

The dress of Mexican women of the upper classes 
is of Parisian manufacture or pattern. Most of 
the gowns that are not imported from abroad are 
manufactured at home, the convent-trained Mexi- 
can woman being always skillful with the needle. 
Paper patterns, both French and American, are 
used extensively. The m.aterials are mostly im- 
ported, although some finer grades of cotton goods 
are made in Mexico. 

The middle-class women of Mexico dress with 
some semblance of European style, but in fashions 
which have almost been forgotten in other lands. 
The dresses are long, the skirts gored, and the bodice 
assumes the frumpy appearance suggestive of out- 
worn styles. As we go down the scale, however, 
the outer dresses take even more rigid traditional 
form in calico of dark hues, cut straight and very 
long, often dragging on the ground. Here the 
headgear is the blue reboso, and shoes are worn, 
usually without stockings. Corsets and most lin- 
gerie have disappeared. The peon women dress in 

296 



CLOTHING 

various grades from the calico of the workman's 
wife do"\vn to the rags of the beggars. 

In the Indian tribes which still retain their 
ancient customs of dress it is sometimes the women 
who are more distinctive, as white manta is almost 
universal as a dress for the Indian man. The 
mountain Indians about Mexico City and Guana- 
juato, chiefly of the Otomi race, come down to the 
cities and villages to market, the men dressed in 
white, the women sometimes in dark-colored woolen 
skirts drawn tightly about their waists and ex- 
tending a little below the knees, the upper part of 
their bodies covered with the ancient type of 
jacket, sometimes of wool, sometimes of cotton, 
without sleeves, and not fastened to the skirt. 

The Indian women of other tribes also have their 
typical dress, the most notable being those of the 
Tehuantepec, famous for their beauty and for the 
beautj^ and elaborateness of their costume. The 
waist is of fine cotton, embroidered in bright colors, 
and itself of beautiful shades ranging from rich 
purple to pale yellow. This hangs loosely from the 
shoulders, and misses the skirt by a wide space of 
fair bro^vn flesh. On feast days it is almost covered 
by an elaborate headdress, which, when worn to 
church or at festivals, surrounds the face with an 
oval of starched white rays eight to ten inches long. 
The Tehuana women adorn themselves with great 
chains made of gold coins ranging from the Ameri- 
can double eagle (S20) through the Mexican azteca 
(twenty pesos) down to the tiny American one- 
dollar gold pieces. 

297 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The use of underclothing in Mexico is confined 
very largely to the upper classes, but the women 
even lower in the scale wear chemises, even though 
they do not ordinarily wear stockings. Indeed, 
a dark calico chemise is a universal garment of low- 
class Mexican women, being used as an undergar- 
ment in the daytime, as a nightdress for sleeping, 
and as a suit for outdoor bathing, the body and the 
chemise being washed together in the streams. 

The shoes of Mexico have not a little social im- 
portance. It is said that in the formation of an 
early Mexico City directory those who wore shoes 
were all mentioned, but none others appeared, and 
there has always been a very easy distinction be- 
tween those who wear sandals and those who wear 
shoes, a distinction analogous to that between the 
women who wear hats and those who wear only 
scarfs over their heads. 

Cosmetics and perfumes are in very general use 
throughout all classes in Mexico, even peon women 
finding great pleasure in the possession and use of 
strong-smelling extracts. Perfume is expensive, 
the price of the native product being regulated by 
the cost of the imported article, on which a heavy 
duty has always been levied. Mexican women 
have always used a great deal of powder, the tradi- 
tion being that powder forms a protection against 
the tropical sun and dry winds. Creams and other 
cosmetics are used extensively, also in an effort to 
counteract this influence. Some rouge is used by 
Mexican women, but as a rule the complexion 
most esteemed is the pasty white, which is achieved 

298 



CLOTHING 

by the use of vast quantities of face powder, often 
plastered over a coating of glycerine or cosmetic 
cream, to make it stick. 

The Mexican woman appreciates adornment, and 
jewelry has always been used generously in the 
republic. The national desire for show has led 
to the importation of second-grade stones, which 
are manufactured into elaborate ''sunbursts," 
necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc. Jewelry in 
Mexico is bought for display, and the American 
conception of it as an investment, which has made 
the market for fine stones so much better than that 
for second-grade, is seldom considered in Mexico. 
Many peculiar styles of adornment, such as the 
great Spanish combs of carved tortoise shell and 
jeweled work, have always been appreciated in 
Mexico. They formed an indispensable part of the 
dress typical of an earlier day, and are far from 
absent in the elaborate coiffures which many 
Mexican ladies and all the women of the upper 
middle class assume for festivals and balls. 

Mexican children follow, in dress, the garb of 
their parents, and the peon boy is a miniature, in 
his diminutive peaked hat and his tiny zerape, of 
his own father, and the little peon girl, save for the 
shortness of her dresses and her frank and obvious 
addiction to the one-piece garment, an image of her 
mother. In the upper ranks, the boys are dressed 
as the French and Spanish youths of their class, 
and the girls are starched and helpless in lace and 
frilled and beribboned dresses, topped by coif- 
fures as elaborate, if not so high, as those of their 

299 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

mothers and grown sisters. Mexican babies of the 
upper classes are dressed in long and lacy gowns, 
and the panorama of a Mexican family out for a 
walk is invariably guarded in the rear by a dusky, 
dull-dressed and not always clean nursemaid, her 
unwashed reboso swung about the baby, but under- 
neath the flowing white gown, so that all the beauties 
of the garment are displayed for the admiration of 
the passing throng. 



IX 

CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

THE casual commentator usually overempha- 
sizes the uncleanliness of the mass of the 
Mexican people. So far as uncleanliness is com- 
mon, however, it may be traced largely to the very 
great proportion of extremely poor people; poverty 
and filth everywhere go hand in hand. The Mex- 
ican of the upper classes is quite as clean as the 
American or Englishman, and not until we reach 
the lower Mexican types do we find the picturesque 
group who traditionally and literally bathe their 
bodies only on the annual festival of St. John the 
Baptist. 

By the usually invariable test of odor, most 
Mexican crowds average well, excepting in the 
case of the low-caste leperos, who wash neither 
bodies nor clothes. This is probably due to the 
relative cleanliness of the outer rannent, for the 
traditions of the Mexican peasantry seem to tend 
toward a busy washing of the clothing rather than 
to meticulous cleanliness of the body. 

The laundry customs of Mexico are picturesque 
and far from inefficient. Soap is expensive, and 
even the native product, which is almost useless for 

301 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cleansing, commands a high price. The peon 
woman will, therefore, scrub for hours in a stream 
with little or no soap, and with the sun as her only 
aid in bleaching. The typical Mexican laundry is 
located on a river bank and consists of a few flat, 
smooth stones sloping toward the stream, with a 
tin cup or gourd for scooping the water up to splash 
over the clothes. Here the women kneel to their 
work, and so deep rooted is custom that the usual 
modern municipal laundry is a shed by the side of 
a stream, with running water diverted into a channel 
running between sloping slabs of cement, where 
the women kneel at their scrubbing as they have 
done for generations. The clothes are not rubbed 
over the stones or cement or over anything that 
corresponds to the American washboard, the cloth 
being pulled together and rolled between the hands 
and the stone, with a peculiar motion which only 
a Mexican laundress can achieve, and which does 
not rasp or wear the fabric. The process, if com- 
bined with plenty of soap and the drying under the 
sun on the grass, results in a whiteness and sweet- 
ness which are always reassuring. Where, how- 
ever, the limitations of poverty prevent the use of 
soap, the clothing, even when thoroughly washed, 
is gray and dingy. 

Mexican servants are efficient with the fiat iron, 
which they heat, evenly and cleanly, over charcoal, 
and garments return in beautiful condition. It 
may be mentioned, however, that even in a family 
of two or three, one woman is assigned to the laun- 
dry work alone, and spends the entire week over it. 

302 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

The Mexican laundress is a happy soul, and gos- 
sips and jokes with her friends while she scrubs and 
keeps an eye upon her children paddling in the 
stream. Incidentally, she washes her long black 
hair, even though she may fail to wash her body. 
This has always impressed the visitor from abroad 
as a sign of the cleanliness of the Mexican women, 
but if they themselves are questioned they are 
usually quite frank in saying that they wash their 
hair often because it discourages vermin. 

For the Mexican peon, male or female, uses 
water only "when needed." This carries no 
especial reflection on Mexico, but it does classify 
the peon with some exactness. The North Ameri- 
can Indian has never been a model of cleanliness, 
nor has the Chinese coolie, and the Mexican peon 
seems to fall into their group. Below the very 
highest classes bathing is not a daily, nor even a 
weekly, habit. In the tropics, one bathes to keep 
cool, and the tropical Indian is, as a rule, much 
cleaner than his cousin on the plateau. Habit and 
tradition have affected this custom considerably, 
however, for the filth among the hot-country con- 
tract laborers from the plateau towns is always 
in striking contrast to the clean native Indians who 
work with them. On the plateau, where the 
body seldom sweats except under exertion, the 
need of bathing does not force itself through any 
bodily discomfort, and it is probably literally true 
that in the lower strata no complete baths are 
taken at all, excepting on St. John's Day, June 
24th. The peon, therefore, goes about in his filthy 
20 . 303 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

rags and with dirt caked on his calloused feet until 
that wisely emphasized churchly festival or until 
a policeman drags him, protesting loudly, off to a 
pubhc bathhouse. This latter function of au- 
thority is exercised, from time to time, during 
typhus and other epidemics, when policemen spend 
their days picking out the filthiest from groups of 
workmen, taking them to public baths, and there 
sternly superintending their ablutions and the 
washing of their clothes. Public bathhouses 
have been established in Mexico City and in other 
plateau towns for many years, and under the Diaz 
rule the number of these places kept well ahead of 
the demand, although on festival days and Sundays 
they were often crowded. 

While the peon of the plateau may be frankly 
dirty, the mestizo Mexican who has risen from 
clean mania shirt and pantaloons to woolen rai- 
ment which is never washed, is very likely to be 
far less attractive from the point of view of cleanli- 
ness. The psychology of this type of Mexican 
seems to overemphasize the value of the outward 
appearance as against the inward virtue, and the 
clerk class in Mexico, with their more or less clean 
collars, too often wear a very dirty shirt that sug- 
gests underclothing that is even less fresh. The 
problem of cleanliness in Mexico is rather one of 
educating the native to desire it than of making 
him clean with the sweet conviction that cleanliness 
will lead him closer to godliness. 

The private bathroom is yet to achieve the glory 
of common use in Mexico. Except for dwellers in 

304 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

the most modern houses, it is the "bathhouse" to 
which a Mexican repairs daily (or less often) for his 
"scrub." These bathhouses (of which there are a 
large number in all cities) maintain a certain 
standard of cleanliness and sanitation, with con- 
siderable luxury where the prices justify it. Music 
is often played in the patio, and the bathers — the 
men and women in separate sections — sit in the 
corridors, visiting and taking refreshments. The 
baths are of various sorts, tub, shower, and Turk- 
ish, with relatively modern equipment. The bath- 
house usually furnishes towels, soap, and the little 
twist of vegetable fiber which the Mexican has come 
to use as a scrub brush. The dressing rooms, 
equipped with brush and comb, also furnish a tiny 
vial of grease or oil for the hair. 

Outside of Mexico City most of the bathhouses 
were built many years ago, although there are 
some with modern improvements. The really 
typical Mexican baths are, however, in towns 
where there are natural hot springs. They consist 
of many rooms with Roman baths almost large 
enough to swim in, and filled with running water of 
varying temperatures. The baths at Aguas CaU- 
entes, for instance, have a series of rooms with the 
degree of temperature marked over the door, the 
water coming from hot and cold springs in the im- 
mediate vicinity. Here is genuine luxury, and the 
water, continually running, is like blue crystal. 
Attendants furnish towels, and soap and the twist 
of fiber in a tin dish which floats on the water. The 

traveler in Mexico who has enjoyed even one of 

305 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

these beautifully luxurious baths, with its thought- 
ful attendance and the half hour's rest, wrapped 
in his sheet in a steamer chair or on a cot, soothed 
with a Mexican cigarette and a glass of Spanish 
sherry, must go far beyond the dictates of his heart 
to enter into any great diatribes upon the bathing 
facilities of Mexico. 

Household cleanliness is, Uke bathing, largely a 
matter of class, but the conscientious Mexican 
housewife, whether she be American, English, or 
native, has almost insuperable difficulties in con- 
vincing her low-class servants of the value and im- 
portance of true cleanliness. As a rule, when it is 
attained in any degree it is almost solely through 
the exercise of authority, and not through any 
successful assault upon the peon philosophy. 

Vermin, the inevitable accompaniment and index 
of filth, are common in Mexico. Bedbugs are 
almost universal, and infest clothing as well as 
beds. Cockroaches swarm throughout the Mexican 
house of high or low degree — cockroaches of every 
size and color, from the elephantine type nearly 
two inches long, to the smallest and busiest denizen 
of the kitchen. There is a tradition that the cock- 
roach wages war upon the bedbug, and as the 
cockroach does not bite and is easily large enough 
to be extracted from the cooking if he falls in, he 
is allowed free range of the house in the fond il- 
lusion that his presence keeps down the population 
of the ubiquitous chinches, or bedbugs. Rats and 
mice are comparatively rare, due, perhaps, to the 
custom of keeping very little food in the house, 

306 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

Fleas are everywhere, especially during the dry 
season, when the dusty roads and even the dust of 
the churches are infested with them, the Mexican 
flea being impersonal in his attentions to animals 
and hmnans. Head lice are almost universal with 
the lower classes, body lice infest their garments, 
and both species roam the prisons and pubhc places 
where the peons forgather. One of the common 
sights on the Mexican highways is the pleasant 
social scene of a mother, with her children about her, 
picking the lice from their heads, for all the world 
like a family of monkeys in a zoo. 

The age-old battle of the careful housewife 
against vermin thus is often a losing one in Mexico. 
Sunlight, in the typical Mexican house, almost 
never reaches into the rooms, and the traditions of 
household sanitation are extremely primitive. The 
custom of garbage disposal is either to burn it in 
more or less malodorous ovens in the patio or the 
rear of the house, or to throw it in heaps, where it 
lies for days, and sometimes weeks, until it is 
carried away by men hired by the householder, or, 
very seldom, by the city. In villages, garbage and 
refuse are thrown on the ground, and practically 
no care is taken except to have the dump as far as 
practicable from the house. 

Most Mexican kitchens in the better type of 
houses have running water, and there is running 
water in the patios and in bathrooms when such 
exist, but there is seldom, if ever, water in the 
bedrooms, and usually no stationary washstands 
in the bathrooms. Waterclosets are still com- 

307 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

paratively rare in Mexico, and one of the classic 
stories has to do with an old-fashioned hacendado 
who had a modern watercloset erected in the patio 
of his house, where it was shown to visitors as one 
of the curiosities of his establishment. 

The whole subject of sanitation, in home and 
community, is complicated by the dead weight of 
ignorance and tradition on the mass of the people. 
The only government in Mexico which has ever 
taken a firm grip on the problem of sanitation was 
that of General Diaz, which accomplished tre- 
mendous things in the way of public works and 
yet was baffled eternally in its attempt to make 
these works useful and to extend their functions 
down to the life of the individual. His Federal ex- 
penditure totaled about P46,000,000 for major 
works of sanitation and water supply in the capital 
and ports, this including nearly P30,000,000 for 
drainage and water supply of the capital, P4,000,000 
for Vera Cruz, etc. All this is exclusive of improve- 
ments which had been made by the municipalities 
and states outside of the Federal jurisdiction. 

As a rule, the water supply of Mexican cities is 
now fairly pure. This is due alone to the measures 
which were introduced by the Diaz government. 
There has also been a very considerable develop- 
ment of sewerage systems of a modern type, all of 
them works of considerable cost. Usually these 
were carried out by foreign contracting companies 
and engineers, although many able Mexican sani- 
tary engineers took an active and commendable 
part in their construction. 

308 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

Previous to the modern sanitation introduced by 
Diaz, the water of Mexican towns was almost 
invariably brought through open gravity aqueducts, 
some of which came for considerable distances, the 
great arched conduits being landmarks of almost 
every Mexican city, and monuments to the en- 
gineering enterprise of Aztec and Spaniard. Water 
from these gravity aqueducts was usually piped 
only to fountains in the centers of the cities, and 
from there was carried to the houses by the women 
or by pubhc water carriers in great earthen jars or 
leather bags. The sewage and refuse disposal was 
accomplished through the gutters which ran down 
the centers of the cobblestone-paved streets, and 
buzzards and pigs were the most important workers 
in the Mexican sanitary system. Through the 
efficiency of the Diaz government and its able 
engineers, both native and foreign, these pic- 
turesque features of Mexican community life have 
almost disappeared and are to be found to-day only 
in the most backward of outlying villages and towns. 

Since the fall of Diaz sanitary conditions in 
Mexican cities have greatly deteriorated, but the 
basic foundation of efficient sewer systems and 
water supply remain. The greatest difficulty in 
enforcing sanitation in Mexico is the apathy of the 
people, who have always found sanitary regulations 
irksome, and whose processes of mind and habits 
make it difficult to induce them to use the public 
conveniences except under the pressure of law and 
the police. The closing of public wells in most 
Mexican cities has, of course, been possible without 

309 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

great difficulty, but it has been less easy to stop 
soil contamination. 

In the ordinary Indian village there are no toilet 
arrangements and the condition of filth even around 
the houses and in public squares continues to men- 
ace the community health. Even where conveni- 
ences are established their drainage is often un- 
provided for and there is little or no attempt to keep 
the water supply pure, the same streams being used 
for both water and drainage, and for bathing into 
the bargain. Like most of the problems of Mexico, 
the full achievement of mimicipal sanitation waits 
upon education, the training of the Indian up to 
desiring the more sanitary and comfortable provi- 
sions of modern community organization. 

The difficulties of the higher officials of the Diaz 
government in bringing their ideas into realization 
have been aggravated by their inability to get 
efficient personnel in the lower offices, either in 
trained men or conscientious workers. In addition, 
in the states the commissions of public health have 
had little power and less ambition, and, as a rule, 
almost no funds. The few really conscientious 
and intelligent physicians and sanitary experts who 
have worked in Mexico have told of the most 
discouraging lack of support from the munici- 
palities. Careful regulations are made out in the 
capital and distributed throughout the country, 
but no one enforces them, and open cesspools, 
sewers without disinfection, piles of rubbish, and 
pools of dirty water mark every Mexican com- 
munity, from the best to the worst. 

310 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

All of this has been substantiated by the reports 
of the United States Army and American Red 
Cross officials of the clean-up which was accom- 
plished in the city of Vera Cruz during its occupa- 
tion by United States troops in 1914. Under the 
direction of American doctors Vera Cruz was 
cleaned up in about one month. Defiled wells were 
sealed or filled up, stagnant pools drained off or 
covered with oil, swamps filled in., etc. The 
American soldiers found wagon loads of garbage in 
comers and passages of pubhc restaurants, piles of 
garbage drying in the patios, and thousands of 
breeding places for flies and vermin which had 
apparently been untouched for years. These were 
carried off and destroyed, three collections of gar- 
bage made daily, and a complete inspection of the 
city directed toward the maintenance of rigid sani- 
tary regulations. The reports on these matters^ 
show that when the American troops occupied Vera 
Cruz the town was infested with flies, so that, as 
one writer put it, ''it was difficult to tell which was 
food and which was flies," but at the end of a single 
month the conditions were so improved that there 
were practically no flies in streets, restaurants, or 
private houses, and even the market places were 
largely relieved of the pests. 

The biu-ial methods in Mexican communities 
have been the subject of picturesque discussion and 
of the diatribes of sanitary experts. The rented 
coffin and shroud, the lack of embalming, the open 
funeral cars, and the rented graves come in for 

1 Charles Jenkinson in The Survey, vol. xxiii, no. 6. 
311 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

severe criticism. This is all deserved, for the cus- 
toms are but part and parcel of the appalHng 
absence of the ideals of municipal cleanliness. 

The Mexican cemetery is usually located within 
the city limits, and although burials in chiu-ches 
have been prohibited for some years, the ceme- 
teries, occupying a comparatively limited section 
of ground, are located on hills or slopes, so as to be, 
as a rule, a real menace to the public health. This 
is increased by the fact that the graves are rented 
for periods of from one to seven years, and when 
emptied after these burial periods, the space is im- 
mediately used again, and the defilement of the 
soil is continuous. The custom of renting the 
coffin and the shroud is, of course, hopelessly 
perilous to public health, but it is continued gener- 
ally among the lower classes. Embalming is prac- 
ticed to a certain extent, but the Mexican law 
requires that a licensed physician perform this 
operation, and it is extremely expensive, and in 
some cases is most inadequate. The general law 
in Mexico is that a body must be buried within 
twenty-four hours after death, and this is usually 
followed. There is very little shipping of remains 
from town to town, for where this is done the law 
requires that they be embalmed and that a metal 
casket be used. 

All this is indicative of the fact (which becomes 
more and more emphasized as one goes deeper into 
the study of living conditions) that it is the psy- 
chological attitude of the people which is the root 
of most of the evils of the country. Mexicans are 

312 



CLEANLINESS AND SANITATION 

dirty, are careless with sanitation, solely because 
they do not consider it worth while to put forward 
the effort which a correction of these conditions 
demands. In essence there is little in these phases 
of Mexican life which is different from what may 
be seen in almost any country in the world, but 
Mexico's conditions are aggravated by the fact 
that the traditions upon which her people act 
are deeply rooted in race and confined within the 
barriers of extreme poverty. In more enlightened 
communities the people can be educated, or can be 
stirred by published warnings of epidemics, while 
in Mexico the masses cannot read and their apathy 
baffles almost all teaching and warning. It is for 
this reason, and probably for this reason alone, 
that the Mexican uncleanliness, lack of sanitation, 
and carelessness in disease have been able to rear 
such a wall against improved living conditions. 

The problem in this, as in so many other phases 
of Mexican life, lies in education, an education 
which seems almost hopeless of achievement in the 
present mass of the population, but an education 
which brave men in Catholic cloisters, in Protestant 
churches, and in government departments are fac- 
ing with such courage and understanding as their 
own education and training will allow them. The 
Mexican plans seem to have failed and failed again, 
while American methods, and principally the Ameri- 
can police control, were able in a few short months 
to accomplish wonders in the single city of Vera 
Cruz. How much of a reflection on Mexico this is, 
and how much more of a reflection it will prove as 

313 



THE :PEOPLE^ OF MEXICO 

the contrast persists through years to come, is 
something which can only be touched on here. 
Basically the American methods followed those of 
the Diaz government, differing only in that their 
imposition of change came from miUtary control 
and was achieved with more persistence and energy 
than Diaz was ever able to summon. 

The contrast, however, will long remain in the 
American mind, as well as in the minds of the 
Mexicans who looked on at Vera Cruz and now 
look back to the days of Diaz, as perhaps the most 
significant demonstration of the potency of the 
white man's energy and understanding in working 
toward the solution of Mexico's great problems. 



X 

THE CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

IN many ways all of the chapters of this book 
are but discussions of the various conditions 
under which the Mexican finds himself a living in 
his native land. From another viewpoint, the 
labor problem, and the land problem which has so 
much to do with its determination, lie completely 
outside the scope of this work. The middle ground, 
however, sees the conditions under which a nation 
works as part of the myriad forces which determine 
the way in which its people live. 

Of those conditions of work, a round half dozen 
seem to bear directly upon the study to which we 
have set ourselves, the unwinding of the colorful 
threads which form the fabric of Mexico's national 
life. Primarily, because Mexico is chiefly an agri- 
cultural nation, is the relation of the land question 
to the problem of human living. 

There has never been any lack of land for the 

people of Mexico; the problem has been rather, as 

one Mexican has expressed it, "a lack of people for 

the land." With a population averaging eighteen 

to the square mile, with ten acres of nonmountain- 

315 



y 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

ous land per capita, Mexico stands out among the 
countries of the world for her vast tracts of unde- 
veloped property and for the paucity of her pro- 
duction of the necessities of life. 

Opportunity to use the tillable land has never 
been lacking. A capitalist, large or small, can 
always buy land — there is little jealous guarding of 
ancestral property or of all the best property, as 
foreign companies have proven by their purchases 
for many years. Good land has a market value, 
however, and a pecuharity of peasants with "land 
hunger" seems to be that they do not wish to pay 
the value of the real estate which whets their de- 
sire, and will not take anything less appetizing. 

Even without capital, land is still obtainable in 
Mexico. An Indian in his communal group has 
from time immemorial to this day been able to 
obtain the use of a tract of his native village farming 
land — for all but a relatively small percentage of the 
country Indians still live under village organizations. 

But even if he does not live in a communal state, 
there is open to the Indian, as to the mestizo peon, 
perhaps the most generous farming arrangement in 
the world, for he can go to practically any of the 
great haciendas in Mexico and arrange with the 
proprietor to plant, till, and harvest on shares as 
large a tract as he can handle of the best grade of 
land, with no risk to himself and with a guaranty 
of his livelihood in any case and of a profit in pro- 
portion to the quality of his crop. 

These are the basic facts of the relationship of the 

worker to the land in Mexico. They go back to 

316 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

certain early conditions which antedate the present 
era by four centuries. Before the conquest in 
1521, the Indians had no private ownership, only 
tribal ownership, of land. The Spanish govern- 
ment, recognizing this system, endowed all the 
Indian towns with three sorts of real estate, pre- 
serving the communal idea, but giving it some 
legal basis. These properties, community owned, 
were: (1) a town site (Jundo legal)] (2) pasturage 
{egidos); and (3) commons {tierras communales) . 
The town site was the square which could be in- 
scribed in a circle with a radius of six hundred varas 
(about 2,000 feet), the center of the circle being 
the center, or plaza, of the town, each family having 
its hut and "orchard" in the village. The pas- 
turage, or egidos, was a one-league square of grazing 
land, so that the natives "could feed their cattle, " 
as the law expressed it. The commons, of varying 
size, were forest and farm lands owned by the com- 
munity, and heads of families were assigned certain 
sections which they were to work, and they could 
neither sell, mortgage, nor lease it. 

These Indian properties remained untouched, 
even after the independence from Spain, until in 
1856 the Juarez government ordered the allotment 
of all real estate pertaining to the villages to the 
members of the community. This law excepted 
the pasturage land, or egidos, on the ground of public 
utility, and also the town sites, in view of the fact 
that these were already parceled out to individuals. 
Later, the constitution of 1857 legally prohibited 
the common ownership of even the egidos, or pas- 

317 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

turages, and ordered that these also be partitioned, 
although, owing to the frequent revolutions, this 
was not carried out. After the decisive triumph of 
the republic, ten years passed before any attempt 
was made to enforce these divisions, and then, 
under Diaz, on account of the rapid development 
of the country, the government imdertook to sell 
all the unpossessed lands which had been declared 
national property by the Constitution of 1857. 

The effort to divide the egidos and the commons, 
v/hich included the farming land, was not for the 
purpose of despoiling the Indians, but solely to give 
a definite legal basis of land ownership which would 
make possible the modern development of the 
country. This partition was finally forced by the 
decrees of the Diaz government, which opened 
these lands to denouncement, much as mining 
claims could be denounced, if the Indians, after 
the ample notice given them, did not comply with 
the law. This ''law of survey" has been made 
the text for many attacks upon the Diaz govern- 
ment, but in essence the principle was correct and 
it was vitally necessary to the modern development 
of Mexico, as without it there would have been no 
definite legal basis for land transactions covering 
the coimtry. There were undoubtedly many abuses 
in its enforcement, and unscrupulous individuals 
took advantage of the ignorance of the Indians to 
take their lands from them under this law. But 
there were always legal and even extralegal meth- 
ods of redress, not the least being the appeals 
to ''Don Porfirio" which were made time and 

318 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

again, and were almost invariably in favor of the 
original Indian owners. 

The origin of the great landed estates of Mexico 
goes back to another form of property, the royal 
grants of the Spanish Crown, something entirely 
outside the laws creating the Indian land titles 
just described. There were oppressions under 
these grants, and yet as a general rule the Indian 
properties, to"vvn sites, pasturages, and commons, 
which were inclosed in the larger grants were recog- 
nized both by the colonial government and by the 
hacendados. It was this condition that brought 
about the anomaly of an Indian belonging to an 
hacienda, and at the same time owning his own 
property within the confines of the hacienda, a dis- 
crepancy which was one of the reasons which made 
it vitally important for the Mexican government to 
place the ownership of the Indian lands upon a 
modern legal basis, submission to the laws of survey 
being incumbent on the hacendados, miners, and 
ranchers as well as upon the Indians. 

"V^Hien we pass beyond the two forms of land 
titles established by the Spaniards and as revised 
by the Mexicans after 1856, we find that the human 
element and not the legal system is the detemiining 
factor. This is demonstrated in the Indians' in- 
ability to adapt themselves to modern conceptions 
of property, with the resultant sale of their lands, 
when they were deprived of their communal system, 
to hacendados and to rancheros. 

It is also manifested in the effect which Indian 
apathy and barbaric communism have had upon 

21 319 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the systems of land cultivation. The communal 
groups of the Indians raised only enough for them- 
selves, and to this day the "idesiV' (for such is the 
word the revolutionists use) of the Indian is to 
revive the communistic system which gives him a 
tiny plot of ground where, protected by the com- 
mune's food supplies, he can raise only enough corn 
for his own personal use. The whole history of 
Mexican agriculture is dominated by the virtual 
impossibility of inducing the available laborers to 
work as part of a large production scheme. The 
inevitable result of the refusal of the communistic 
Indian and the small farmer to raise a surplus, 
combined as the condition is with economic and 
transportation conditions outside the scope of this 
work, has been that the hacienda has alone pro- 
duced food for the market and thus for the support 
of the mining and industrial conamunity. Identi- 
fied thus with the very life of Mexico, the labor 
problem of the hacienda becomes vital. Its de- 
pendence on hired help, and its need of making 
that help produce, are, in their turn, the economic 
background of the so-called peonage system. 

The history of peonage goes back to the earliest 
days of the conquest. The first Spanish discoverers 
of Mexico had sailed from Havana in search of new 
lands from v/hich Indian slaves could be obtained 
for the Cuban plantations. Some captures had 
been made by the earliest voyagers, and Cortez's 
primary object on his first trip to Mexico was 
undoubtedly^ to secure more human captives to be 
transported back to Cuba. The richness of the 

320 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

country, however, tempted the Spaniards in other 
directions, and they quickly turned their attention 
to the capture of gold, silver, and precious stones, 
and the imposition of tributes which would produce 
this wealth. 

When after the first flush of conquest they found 
that their dreams of gold and precious stones were 
not reahzed in any such measure as they had an- 
ticipated, their attention returned to the wealth of 
the country which had originally called them, that 
is, its hiunan labor. In Cuba the system of reparti- 
mientos, or distribution of Indian laborers, was 
already in full swing, and the soldiers immediately 
demanded similar privileges in Mexico. These were 
granted by Cortez, and after some difficulties and 
correspondence were confirmed by the king of 
Spain. Villages and even whole tribes of Indians 
were given over bodily to individual Spaniards who 
used them as slaves to work the mines and to till 
the soil. 

A definite distinction was soon made, however, 
between the mine workers and the agricultiu*al 
workers, the Indians employed in the mines being 
first the slaves whom the Aztecs already held, and 
later the captives in wars of the Spaniards against 
rebellious tribes; native laborers outside of these 
classes were not legally used in mining. The term 
repartimiento was officially applied only to the 
first division of Indians, and all subsequent assign- 
ments of workers were known as encomiendas, 
literally a "confirmation" of the original grants, 

which had been only for the lifetime of the recipient; 

331 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

thus the heirs of the original conquerors did not 
receive repartimientos, but encomiendas. The word 
repartimiento then came to be appUed arbitrarily to 
the slave gangs which operated the mines. These 
latter were augmented, as the number of captives 
dwindled and the original slaves died out, by Indian 
criminals and those natives whom the Spaniards 
could induce into a state of debt which they could 
be forced to work out in the mines. 

Much of colonial history is the record of the 
struggles of the Crown and the Council of the Indies 
with the Spaniards of Mexico over the enslavement 
of the Indians. The encomiendas were finally 
abolished, largely through the efforts of Fray 
Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican priest 
who is known as the apostle to the Indians. By 
1545 most of the abuses in connection with the 
encomiendas had been corrected, and, although the 
system itself was allowed to persist, the '^new laws" 
ultimately abolished all of the encomiendas, as the 
owners of the Indians were not allowed to transfer 
their rights, and when they died without legitimate 
issue these reverted to the Crown. The wide gulf 
which, had been created in the beginning, and 
which was perpetuated by the fact that the Span- 
iards had definitely become the landowners and 
patrons and the Indians the laborers and wards, 
continued on to the days of the independence, and 
is the psychological basis of the peonage problem 
of to-day. 

The system of peonage or enforced labor for 
debt, according to the Constitution of 1917, has 

32g 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

now been abolished. Actually, however, it has not 
existed in legal form for sixty years. The Constitu- 
tion of 1857 is as explicit as that of 1917 in providing 
that no one in Mexico may be forced to labor with- 
out his full consent or to work out any debt save 
by choice. But neither the Constitution of 1857 
nor the Constitution of 1917 was able to destroy 
the peonage system at its root — that is, in the 
Indian and peon mind. Feudal obligations are 
comforting and acceptable when they are accom- 
panied by feudal protection. Under the genuine 
Mexican system the peons had a definite master, 
but the master was also the protector of the peons. 
Only under the feudal system could the Indian 
have all the pri\dleges of a member of the family, 
including care when he was sick, education for his 
children, the right to hunt and to fish, and the 
privilege of tilling a private plot of com in his own 
dooryard. In the attempts to abolish peonage the 
Mexican reformers have sought at the same time 
to perpetuate these feudal and patriarchal protec- 
tions, even though the definite attachment of the 
peon to the hacienda is apparently vital to their 
functioning. 

Historically, peonage and the paternal attitude 
of the hacendado toward his workers both go back 
to Spanish times, having their roots in the virtual 
slavery of the encomienda Indians to the conquerors. 
At the time of the independence, however, peonage 
had developed into a financial relationship which 
sealed the service of the peon by a system of debt 

advances — a condition dictated more by the 

323 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

psychology of the Indian than by the greed of his 
master. Under Diaz the abuses of the system of 
advancing money had become so great that thou- 
sands of laborers were carried on plantation books 
with debts as high as PI, 000 each, a sum which 
it was utterly impossible for them ever to work out 
in their lives, and which led inevitably to attempts 
to fasten the debts of fathers upon their sons. 

As it exists in these days, there is almost nothing 
of personal slavery or economic oppression about 
Mexican peonage, save in the small proportion 
which takes the form of convict and shanghaied 
labor. In the vast majority of peonage cases, only 
the money advance holds the worker to his em- 
ployer; there is no other claim to his service. Even 
this money advance in its original form has nothing 
of economic pressure — the peon gets it because he 
insists on having it before he goes to work, and he 
spends it promptly and without formality upon a 
wedding feast, the celebration of a national holiday, 
a Bacchanalian orgy in honor of his favorite saint, 
or on useless finery for his sweetheart. In the old 
days, this first sum averaged P50 (often as little 
as PIO) and it was never over P200. Although the 
hacendado usually managed to keep a peon at work 
for a year before this advance was worked out, 
the anniversary of the festival for w^hich he had 
formerly sold his liberty was almost invariably 
accompanied by a new application and another 
advance. Under this system there was practically 
no real enslavement of labor, as, if the workman 
was unsatisfactory to his employer, or if he was 

324 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

dissatisfied with his conditions, the hacendado to 
whom he was willing to transfer his allegiance was 
glad enough to buy his debt at full value. 

The much criticized hacienda store, or tienda de 
ray a (literally, "ration store"); was a corollary of 
the system of peon debt. Theoretically, it was a 
place where the peons could obtain, on credit, the 
food, clothing, and supplies they wanted, but in 
practice it was often abused to the point of over- 
charging, in order to keep the peon's account so 
heavy that he could never hope to work it out 
entirely. The raya system certainly kept out com- 
petition for the peon's trade, and where, as happened 
in some places, even the '^free" labor was paid in 
paper coupons good only at the tienda de raya, the 
situation did become virtual slavery, the credit 
system and not the original debt advances being 
the means of attaching workers to the haciendas. 

Then came the tremendous demand for labor 
between 1890 and 1910, when, as new industries 
and new plantations opened up, the supply of 
workers became more and more inadequate; and 
the advances made to peons became of themselves 
a more serious source of trouble than the tienda de 
raya had ever been. The henequen industry of 
Yucatan took a great boom owing to the demand of 
Anaerican harvesting machines for stout twine, and 
also hundreds of American rubber and coffee planta- 
tions opened up on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. 
It was then that the peonage system, and with it the 
enganchado, or contract labor system, came into full 
jflower. The prices paid for henequen made it pos- 

325 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

sible to increase the cost of labor tremendously, 
and the Yucatecan landlords combed the Gulf 
coast and finally secured government aid and the 
ultimate transportation of Yaqui Indians from 
Sonora to Yucatan to aid them in the solution of 
their labor problems. They became active bidders 
in the tropical labor market, offering advances up 
to P200 and P300, with transportation to the hene- 
quen fields. 

Then came the American companies which had 
guaranteed their stockholders to plant rubber or 
coffee or sugar in appalling acreages. They had to 
have labor at any cost. They sent to the towns of 
the hot country during festivals, piled silver pesos 
in great heaps on tables, bid against established 
Mexican hacendados and against one another until 
their labor cost them up to PI, 000 per head. The 
laborers were transferred in batches to the planta- 
tions or became part of the entourage of keen con- 
tractors, and in addition to the advances, the pay 
of labor rose from 25 centavos a day to as much as 
P3 a day. Wages at this figure, where clearing, 
planting, weeding, and cultivating all had to be 
done by hand, with the added losses caused by 
laborers who did not fulfill their contracts, piled 
the cost of agriculture to proportions impossible 
for the crops to sustain. 

So valuable did this labor become that bribery 

and government coercion, special detectives and 

policemen, had to be called in to capture and return 

the peons who ran away from their contracts, and 

judges and the mayors of towns were induced to 

326 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

arrest the runaways. When the free labor of the 
tropics was exhausted the American and other 
planters had recourse to the enganchado system. 
This method of contract labor had had its begin- 
nings years before in the Valle Nacional, the great 
tobacco-growing section where Cuban planters had 
been using and abusing con^vict labor fm-nished them 
by the state of Vera Cruz and later by the Federal 
government. Sanitary and working conditions 
were unquestionably frightful in the Valle Nacional, 
and when the Yucatan and Tehuantepec plantations 
entered into the competition the quahty of the 
labor began to deteriorate and the abuses to in- 
crease. The enganchado (literally the '' hooked 
one") was generally a man who was practically 
shanghaied from the cities of the temperate and 
cold zones of Mexico. Often disease-ridden, al- 
most inevitably soaked with pulque, captured and 
"signed up" for labor when they were intoxicated, 
these men were brought down practically in chain 
gangs by the contractors and delivered at so many 
hmidred pesos per head. They were kept in 
barbed-wire inclosures, often under ghastly sanitary 
conditions, their blood vitiated with drink and 
tainted with disease, and were easy \dctims of trop- 
ical insects, dirt, and infection. There is no need 
here to gloss over the conditions attendant upon the 
enganchado system; if excuse there be for its exist- 
ence, we must find it in the material advance of the 
country beyond the social education which alone 
could create the ambition and the industiy to turn 
Mexico's cheap labor into a truly productive factor, 

3?7 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Basically, however, the system of debt advances, 
whether it be in the sunny plaza and with the clean, 
if inconsequential, Indian of the Isthmus, or in the 
dives of the capital, vv^ith the pulque-drmking scum 
of the cities, goes deep into the psychological 
foundations of the Mexican mind. It belongs with 
the desire for paternal care and with the childlike 
craving for the enjoyment of the fruits of labor 
before the labor is assumed. 

The labor problem, in so far as it is a social 
problem, depends ultimately upon education and 
the advance of the native standard of living. To 
achieve these, Mexico must be economically sound, 
and to be economically sound she must produce 
her own foods and support by her own foods the 
industrial and agricultural population which creates 
her wealth. In the present state of her develop- 
ment, the hacendado alone is capable of furnishing 
the nation's food, and to the hacendado, as to the 
mine operator and the plantation manager, the 
patriarchal organization is the only method yet 
devised for harnessing the Indians' need for a liveli- 
hood and his desire for such of the good things of 
life as he can comprehend to the production of a 
surplus food supply to support the mines and 
industry which must be Mexico's chief contribution 
to the created wealth of the world. 

The hacendado may indeed be wrong, but the 
fault is the fault of a national psychology and not 
of individual wills. At his worst, no hacendado 
reUshes the idea of tying up his capital in advances 

to his labor, but the system of advances is milk to 

323 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

the lips of the Indian and peon. The attempt to 
aboHsh peonage in Yucatan under Madero brought 
genuine rehef to the hacendados, and at the same 
time struck consternation to the Indian workers, 
who were cut off from the only system of "savings" 
which they knew — that is, the system of spending 
the money first and having the hacendado save it 
and repay himself afterward. 

The attitude of the Mexican toward his work, 
thus expressed, has much to do with his efficiency, 
and this, needless to say, is not improved by the 
hopelessness of his outlook, whether this is due to 
his own shortsightedness or to the oppressions of 
his superiors. Mexicans themselves have been the 
first to deplore the low production of their people, 
and Matias Romero, writing in American news- 
papers in 1892, stated that "in the same year when 
the United States, using 7,500,000 laborers, pro- 
duced $3,000,000,000 worth of agricultural products, 
Mexico, using 2,500,000 laborers, produced only 
$239,000,000 worth, the American laborer's pro- 
duction being $399 and the Mexican laborer 
creating only $95." 

American observers have noted that in many 
phases of mine work it takes two or three Mexicans 
to do the work of one American, and where Ameri- 
can machinery is imported it often requires expert 
supervision to maintain its efficiency, so that often 
the upkeep of machinery, including labor costs, in 
Mexico is more than in the United States, and in 
some cases even more than the cost of hand labor 
to acliieve similar results. Since the expulsion of 

329 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the Americans from Mexico by the revolution, the 
Mexicans have maintained in fair working condi- 
tion such machinery as has continued in use. The 
locomotives of the National Railways are patched 
and wheezy, but the Mexicans who are operating 
them, including both the enginemen and the me- 
chanics in the shops, have displayed much ingenuity 
in the maintenance of the equipment. But this 
ingenuity has been without appreciation of costs 
and at a terrific expense in ruined material and in 
wasteful maintenance of almost worn-out engines, 
where many in better actual condition have been 
allowed to rust away because the problems of then- 
repair required a greater effort of planning than the 
maintenance at low efficiency of the locomotives 
still in use. 

Observations made by American industrial ex- 
perts in the Mexican cotton factories during the 
Diaz time were to the effect that the quickest of the 
Mexican boys could not manage over 450 or 500 
spindles, while a bright girl in the Fall River fac- 
tories can handle as many as 700, and one observer 
went so far as to say that if the Mexican factory, 
with all its advantages in the way of hours and 
labor and wages, were transferred to New England, 
it would, in place of realizing a profit, sink $100,000 
per year.^ 

The adaptability of the Mexican and his capacity 

for learnmg new trades which modern industry 

has opened to him are, however, uniformly praised. 

One of the most remarkable achievements of any 

1 David A. Wells, A Study of Mexico, p. 150. 
330 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

great industrial corporation was that of the Na- 
tional Hallways of Mexico in the creation of the 
class of mechanics and engineers who made the 
industrial development of Mexico possible. In the 
twenty-two years from 1890 to 1912 the National 
Railways put tlirough systematic training between 
15,000 and 18,000 Mexican workmen, most of them 
unskilled laborers with a wage of 623^ centavos a 
day. In courses lasting one to three years, these 
men became skilled mechanics, &emen, and loco- 
motive enginemen, who are to-day earning from 
P8 to P12 daily on the Mexican railway systems, 
or in mines and industries.^ 

From a period when it was absolutely impossible 
to hire a Mexican who could operate even a simple 
American machine to the creation of a class of 
mechanics and mine workers who are as a whole 
appreciated and praised by their former American 
and British employers, is an achievement for which 
there cannot be too much praise. Perhaps the 
chief deterrent of the fuU development of the 
Mexican as a mechanic is his proverbial carelessness. 
In the handling of dynamite in the mines, in the 
operation of dangerous machinery, and in the atten- 
tion which is required to save delicate tools from 
destruction, he often falls below normal standards. 
Yet this condition is perhaps due more to his lack 
of the intelligence that comes from general edu- 
cation and general appreciation of values than to 
anything directly related to his trade. 

1 Testimony of E. N. Brown before the United States Senate 
Subcommittee Investigating Mexican Affairs, 1920, p. 1792, 

331 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

In his use of tools the Mexican has had only a 
brief inheritance. The universal tool in Mexico is 
the machete, a knife about three feet long and two 
inches wide which the peon uses for harvesting his 
crops, for clearing the jungle, and as his chief side 
arm as a soldier. American tools he has learned 
to use but slowly, and is only beginning to under- 
stand the convenience of American saws, axes, 
shovels, and plows, while his personal aversion to 
anything in the way of labor-saving machinery is 
still the marvel of his white employers. Not least 
typical of the anecdotes of an earlier day is the 
story of the Mexican worlonan who, having been 
in the United States, returned to report that he 
found that ''they are very backward in hand work 
up there." 

The question of Mexican labor efficiency re- 
solves itself ultimately into a psychological problem. 
The chief failure reported by all employers of labor, 
both Mexican and foreign, is the lack of applica- 
tion and the low mentality of the laborers. It is 
for these reasons that the employers of women in 
such industries as the cotton mills find that in 
spite of the cigarette smoking and other ways of 
wasting time which are characteristic of the Mexican 
male, he will do more work than the average peon 
woman, whose mind, untrained either in school or 
in the keenness of the street gamin, finds the appli- 
cation required for the handling of spindles and 
looms too great a mental burden to be sustained 
for full working hours. The whole question of 
labor efficiency seems inevitably to be carried into 

333 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

the question of mental training, and hence again to 
education. 

In fact, the Mexican in any class of work cannot 
be called a steady producer. The climate is un- 
doubtedly a factor here, as is the national tendency 
to indulge joyously in festivities and recuperate 
gloomily by days of idleness after each debauch. 
But even in the factories an hour is taken for break- 
fast and an hour for lunch, and throughout the 
day there are always periods of rest, there are 
innumerable smokings of cigarettes, and inevitable 
relaxations are required by the mentality or the 
physique of the worker. 

The hours of labor, moreover, vary with the 
climate and vv^ith the type of work done. In the 
hot country the laborer is up and at his work by 
4 A.M., and in many places his day is done at 11, 
when the sun has risen so high and the heat be- 
come so intense that continued physical exertion is 
impracticable. In the factories of Orizaba, the 
workers are often at their looms from 6 in the 
morning to 8 at night, a period broken by frequent 
rests, but formerly totaling approximately ten hours. 
In the farms on the plateau the work is from 6 in 
the morning to noon and from 1 or 2 to 6 in the 
afternoon. In the mining districts the working 
day varies with the local conditions, but used to 
average ten hours. 

As a general rule the hours of industry under 
Diaz totaled from ten to fourteen a day, except in 
the hot country. Under the Presidency of Fran- 
cisco de la Barra (between President Diaz and Presi- 

333 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

dent Madero) a basic eight-hour day was proclaimed 
in the cotton industry. Carranza's government ex- 
tended this to take in the entire industrial field, a 
rule of somewhat questionable wisdom in Mexico, 
where the native development of "piecework"- — 
the tarea, or task system — ^has long offered a more 
acceptable solution of the human problem of labor. 

Since time immemorial the laborer has been 
assigned the amount of work which it is believed 
that he should do in a day, a task which can usually 
be finished in eight hours or in six by an industrious 
workman. The origin of the system goes back to 
the days of the Spanish hacendados, who found even 
then that if their labor was given a definite amount 
of work each day it would accomplish that work 
in a comparatively brief space, while if it was 
worked by the hour it would inevitably loaf and 
waste. 

The task system has through centuries been 
worked out to extreme niceties in Mexico, and the 
discussions of Mexican labor by foreigners almost 
inevitably reveal in each report the moment of 
the foreigner's *' discovery" of the efficiency of the 
task system. It is this method as worked out on 
the plantations in the hot country that makes it 
possible for the laborers to do a day's work in the 
hours between 4 and 11 a.m. noted above. In 
other sections of the country the task system is 
such that industrious laborers have found it pos- 
sible to do two tareas, or two days' work, in ten hoiu's 
of steady grind. It is to be noted that it is chiefly 

in the lines where it is impossible or too expen- 

334 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

sive an administrative problem to lay out tai-eas 
that there has been most difficulty with Mexican 
labor. 

The peonage system and the task method of 
handling labor are the most significant factors of 
the working conditions, as such, in the agricultural 
field. Their influence and the influence of other 
changes which have come in recent years have 
also been felt in other industries. In mining, the 
slow development away from the "rat hole" work- 
ings of olden days to the modern methods of the 
great foreign companies and a great elaboration of 
the task system has brought with it decided changes 
in working conditions. 

The cotton mills of Mexico, save for their long 
hours, have been neither horrible examples of un- 
sanitary conditions nor yet models of what such 
establishments should be. Many of them are lo- 
cated in the cities, but most are in the country, near 
water power, where air and light are cheap. There 
is practically nothing comparable to "sweat-shop" 
working conditions in Mexican industry, though 
often both workmen and employer, more unthinking 
than grasping, may overlook some of the provisions 
which are necessities to the minds of more advanced 
industrial experts. 

It is probable, indeed, that the worst conditions 
in Mexico are to be found in the so-called "home" 
and "native" industries, where the workers are 
content to live and work in a stifling, crowded 
environment, for it is primarily the native lack of 
values in the matter of light, air, and cleanliness 

22 335 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

that is at the root of all the evils prevalent in 
Mexican factories, as in Mexican homes. 

The laboring classes of Mexico are naturally 
divided by working conditions into three very 
distinct groups, which may be taken as the social 
classifications of labor: 

1. The common laborers, including the field workers and 
those employed in building and on the construction of railways, 
highwaj^s, and public works, 

2. The workers dependent upon modern industry, and 

3. The workers in primitive industries. 

In Mexico, the peon, or conunon laborer, not only 
does the farm work, digs the ditches, carries the 
burdens of mine and manufacture upon his back, 
but works at such trades as carpentry, plastering, 
stone cutting, the making of adobe bricks, etc., for 
as a rule only the chief carpenter or mason con- 
siders himself above the peon class. In the census 
figures of employees in industry, however, no clear 
division is made to distinguish common laborers 
engaged in such business as carpentry and masonry, 
for instance, and even railroading, from the common 
peons, on the one hand, or from the skilled workers in 
these industries, on the other. For this reason it is 
probable that the 3,130,402 peones del campo (rural 
peons) listed in the 1910 census include many 
thousands of unskilled laborers in industries other 
than agriculture. To the group of common laborers, 
we must, however, add the 334,600 members of the 
lower class who are engaged in miscellaneous trades 

336 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

that are neither modern nor primitive industry, the 
total then being 3,489,778. 

The workers dependent directly upon modern 
industry include the laborers in factories, railway 
employees, etc. Mining, the workers in which 
number 95,878, may properly be included in this 
class, so that, including 30,592 artisans of the new 
middle-class, the total workers in mines, modern in- 
dustrial plants, and transportation number 293,214. 

The third of the social classifications of labor 
takes in those engaged in the primitive industries 
of an essentially Mexican character. These are 
carried on in the homes of the people and are such 
crafts as pottery, embroidery, and drawn work, 
feather work, home weaving of rebosos, or shawls, 
and the makers of zerapes and other products of 
the hand loom, of baskets and Mexican hats. The 
number thus employed totals 117,858. 

These three divisions account for most of the 
lower classes and some of the higher, but there are 
other groupings essentially connected with the 
higher Mexican social scheme, such as government 
officials, the military and professional classes, in- 
cluding Catholic priests and Protestant mission- 
aries, the commercial field, including bankers, 
clerks, and bookkeepers, miscellaneous trades and 
professions, and domestic servants, including the 
large classification of laundresses. 

To estimate the totals in these general classifica- 
tions the only statistics available are those of the 
Mexican census, that of 1910 being used. (The 
only other industrial census was in 1895.) Ina^- 

337 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

curacies, faults of classification, and such arbitrary- 
divisions as the placing of all day laborers {peones 
del campo or jornaleros) under agriculture, must of 
necessity be carried into the reclassification. This 
new arrangement has been made to show not only 
the social divisions into types of employment, but 
also the proportions of the workers to the three 
social classes, the totals showing 4,554,902 of the 
"laboring classes" and 925,036 of the ''middle and 
upper classes." 



Laboring Classes 



Middle and Upper Classes 
Agriculture 



Farm laborers 3,130,402 

Cattlemen 12,869 

Herdsmen 164 

Shepherds 875 

Horticulturists 10,868 



3,155,178 



Hacendados 834 

Ranchers 24,417 

Farmers 410,566 

Overseers 4,763 



440,580 



Factory employees 

Miners 

Smelter employees 
Metal refiners. ... 
Fiber manufacture 
Cigarette makers . 

Millers 

Cotton manufacture 



Basket makers 

Artificial flower mak- 
ers 

Pulque makers 

Reboso weavers 



Modem Industry 

Industrial administra- 
tors 2,099 

Mining administrators 494 

Assay ers 439 

Contractors 68 

Building foremen 502 



58,840 

79,024 

15,921 

138 

5,829 

6,893 

621 

32,209 

199,475 



Mechanics 23,383 

Machinists 221 

Printers and engravers 5,577 

Electricians 1,411 



Native Industries 
2,086 

1,689 
1,375 

7,346 
338 



34,194 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 



Laboring Classes Middle and Uppbe Classes 

Native Industries (cont.) 

Spinners 486 

Sandal makers 51 

Lace makers 8,606 

Hat makers 17,895 

Mat weavers 22,684 

Potters 22,654 

Sweetmeat makers. . . 5,995 

Adobe-brick makers. . 655 

Charcoal burners ... . 9,155 

Wood gatherers 6,058 

Tamale and biscuit 

makers 1,042 

Chandlers 2,590 

Lime burners 1,255 

Fireworks makers. . . . 3,237 

Chocolate makers .... 305 

Canoe makers 692 

Water carriers 2,002 

117,858 



Business and Transportation 



Railway employees. . , 560 

Locomotive firemen . 41 

Motormen 621 

Sailors and shipwork- 

ers 5,931 

San makers 2,834 

Peddlers 8,165 

Expressmen and 

Freighters 6,008 

Muleteers 25,629 

Wagoners 6,518 

Coachmen 6,470 

Chaxiffeurs 369 



Bankers 

Brokers 

Shippers 

Business agents .... 

Merchants 

Hotel keepers 

Traveling salesmen . 
Telegraph operators. 
Telephone operators . 
Clerks and book- 
keepers 

Stenographers 

Salespeople 



63,146 

Miscellaneous Trades and Professions 



Tanners 

Tailors 

Butchers 

Slaughterhouse em- 
ployees 



8,312 Architects 

25,865 Dentists 

10,360 Engineers 

Midwives 

6,337 Ministers (Protestant). 
339 



174 

1,303 

54 

1,888 

236,278 

233 

49 

2,550 

368 

19,057 
732 

83,442 

346,128 



542 

430 

4,256 

3,027 

285 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Laboking Classes 



Middle and Upper Classes 



Miscellaneous Trades and Professions (cont.) 



Blacksmiths 

Furriers 

Dyers 

Glaziers and gilders 

Hunters 

Salt and gypsum 

workers 

Pastry cooks 

Soap makers 

Coopers 

Barbers 

Bricklayers 

Carpenters 

Plumbers 

Shoe makers 

Brick makers 

Founders 

Brewers 

Bookbinders 

Lumbermen and 

wood workers 

Tinsmiths 

Coppersmiths 

Chicle gatherers 

Bakers 

Harness makers 

Cigar makers 

Stone cutters 

Fishermen 

Lottery-ticket sellers. 
Minor occupations. . . 



22,568 

1,433 

353 

402 

375 

1,090 

1,782 

960 

372 

9,498 

61,762 

67,346 

1,754 

44,114 

3,220 

1,020 

160 

1,173 

6,415 

2,252 

1,173 

790 

29,410 

7,177 

3,474 

7,526 

4,528 

405 

894 

334,600 



Roman Catholic priests 

Notaries 

Physicians, allopathic . 
Physicians, homoeo- 
pathic 

Veterinarians 

Artists 

Writers 

Designers and drafts- 



Musicians 

Sculptors 

Decorators 

Singers 

Archaeologists 

Opticians i . 

Curanderos (herb doc- 
tors) 

Nurses 

Actors, etc 

Bullfighters 

Photographers 

Lapidaries 

Silversmiths 

Watchmakers 



4,405 

318 

3,119 

602 

234 

1,773 

559 

290 

14,214 

699 

7,576 

452 

1 

1 

46 
379 

1,485 
272 

1,206 
369 

3.670 

1,078 

51,288 



Police. . 

Soldiers . 
Navy. . 



Public Service 

6,817 Teachers 21,007 

25,814 Army officers 3,703 

603 Civil service employees 27,602 

Navy officers . . '. 555 

33,234 Diplomatic Corps 62 

52,929 
340 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

Laboring Classes Middle and Upper Classes 

Personal Service 

Domestic servants .. , 241,306 

Laundresses 64,737 

Tortilla makers 26,419 

Janitors 3,841 

Millers (domestic) . . . 253,737 

Seamstresses 82,926 

Dressmaker' 8,452 



681,418 

No Class Divisions 

Housewives 4,138,501 

Scholars 843,741 

Students 30,646 

Without occupation 243,377 

Minors 4,302,435 

Beggars 96 

Mesalinas 2,699 

Trade unknown 65,554 

9,627,049 

In this classification the work of children and 
women is not noted separately. Until the estab- 
lishment of the Department of Labor and Industry 
imder Carranza but few facts were gathered and 
little attention given to these important social classi- 
fications. A census and study of the question were 
begun in Mexico City late in 1919, but only scatter- 
ing data were forthcoming. The usual complaint 
was made of the desire of employers to hinder rather 
than aid the survey, and it is significant of the im- 
mutability of conditions in Mexico that, despite the 
elaborate laws and provisions of the revolutionary 
reformers, for "equal pay for equal work" and for 

proper hours of labor, early reports state that ''the 

341 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

employers do not requite the good qualities of the 
women workers with living salaries. Almost all 
the women have dependents and one wonders how 
they can live on 50, 40, and even 30 centavos a day. 
As to the apprentices, they are kept months without 
wages or perhaps are paid 10 centavos a day for 
nine or ten hours' work."^ 

This mention of apprentices is one of the few 
available notes regarding the work of children. 
Government statistics give only scattering data, 
and these in most unexpected places. Thus the 
report of accidents in the mining industry for 1903 
gives a probably very reliable summary of mining 
employees, separating children as well as women, 
something which census statistics do not give. 
Thus of 78,015 workers in mines, 796 were women 
and 4,278 children; of 21,081 employees in reduc- 
tion works, 36 were women and 825 children.^ 

In factories children have been employed in a 
small way for many years, but the legal limit has 
always been twelve years, and there has been some 
effort to arrange for the education of such workers. 
Under Carranza the laws provided for short hours 
for children under sixteen, but boys are found in the 
mining business and in agriculture well before they 
reach the age limit. 

The Mexican peon is naturally a laborer, and the 
destiny of his children is to the use of their hands 
alone for their livelihood, so that with this over- 
powering tradition of manual labor it is difficult to 

1 Gazeta Mensual del Dpto. del Trabajo, November, 1919, 
^ Anuaria Estadisiico, 1903. 

343 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

judge of the ethics toward Mexican child laborers 
compared with those in other lands. Personal 
observation covering a considerable period of the 
normal years of Mexico under Diaz, and including 
many states and many industries, bears out the 
common opinion that, despite isolated abuses, the 
childhood of Mexico is not overworked, that it is 
not driven to tasks for which it is not fitted, and 
that, above all, it does not wear out its youth on 
"soulless machines." Such a child-labor problem 
as there is in Mexico is still one where prevention 
can be effective, and toward this prevention the 
laws, at least, of both Diaz and Carranza have been 
adequate. 

Of the work of women there are more reliable 
data. In this connection a comparison of figures 
for 1895, when the first industrial census was made, 
and for 1910, is most illiuninating, despite the 
obvious faults of classification. 

In 1895, out of a total of 89,072 workers in mines, 
only 812, or less than 1 per cent, were women, 
figures which, in 1910, had fallen ofl&cially to but 
467 women out of 79,024. Interestingly enough 
in ore reduction, where it might seem that women's 
service could be used more extensively, only 145 
out of 24,811 were women in 1895, and there was 
only 1 woman out of 16,059 in 1910. The statistics 
of agriculture in 1895 listed 110,148 women out of a 
total agricultural population of 2,890,991, or less 
than 4 per cent. The figures for 1910 were 61,981 
women out of 3,570,674, or 1.7 per cent. 

In the professions we find that in 1895, 6,463 of 
343 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

the 12,583 teachers, or 51.3 per cent, were women, 
and in 1910 these figures had grown to 13,532 
women, or 64.6 per cent, out of a total of 21,007 
teachers. In 1895 there were 2,076 mid wives and 
20 women dentists, druggists, and physicians re- 
ported, and in 1910 these figures had grown to 3,027 
midwives and 127 female druggists, 14 dentists, and 
64 physicians. 

Out of 233,222 brokers, merchants, clerks, and 
peddlers in 1895, 55,062, or almost 24 per cent, 
were women, although this large proportion may 
be accounted for by the more detailed division of 
men employees in business. In 1910 the cor- 
responding figures were 52,276 women out of 
276,638, or 18.9 per cent. 

In modern industries and factories the labor of 
women has been growing. In 1895 there were 
8,930 women cigarette makers as against 1,467 
men, the proportion in 1910 being 5,353 women and 
1,540 men, an apparent loss, due to the increase in 
the use of machinery. On the other hand, men 
were used chiefly in the making of cigars in 1895, 
the female hands forming less than 8 per cent of the 
total. The figures for 1910 were 361 women and 
3,113 men, or 11 per cent women. In ''industrial 
estabUshments," referring to cotton factories, there 
were, in 1895, 9,868 women out of a total of 20,994, 
and in 1910 12,565 women out of 32,309. The 
classification of "spinners of cotton and wool" 
probably refers to native hand industry, there being 
30,262 women in this work in 1895 and 13,990 in 
1910. 

344 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

Of the new opportunities which modern business 
has opened to women, the female telegraph opera- 
tors numbered 136 in 1895 and 188 in 1910; there 
were no women telephone operators in 1895, and 
134 in 1910. No typists or stenographers were 
reported in 1895, and in 1910 only thirteen typists 
and no stenographers, the certainly growing number 
of these women employes being lost, probably, in 
the total of clerks (949 in 1895 and 1,876 in 1910). 

In the chief branches of domestic service the 
following changes between the two years are found : 
Women servants, 187,864 in 1895, and 181,914 in 
1910; laundresses, 48,923 in 1895 and 62,324 in 
1910. 

The relations of all Mexican laborers to the em- 
ployer are basically patriarchal. Practically every 
Mexican who has ever worked for another has, as 
his traditional background, only the hacienda or 
the mine. The hacienda, as we have seen, bases its 
efficiency absolutely upon the patriarchal attitude 
of the proprietor toward his peons, and the accumu- 
lated experiences of foreign as well as Mexican 
mine operators supports the early discovery of 
the hacendado, that the most satisfactory way of 
handling labor in Mexico is to attach it to the 
industry by personal bonds with owner, manager, 
or superintendent. 

It is chiefly for this reason also that the form of 
labor organization which has taken its place in 
Mexico in the last decade has been almost entirely 
upon the syndicalist or guild plan. The unions in 
Mexico are unions of factories rather than unions of 

345 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

crafts. The typical Mexican labor organization 
includes every employee at day wages of the plant 
from which the union takes its name, from the 
highest paid skilled mechanic to the most inefficient 
of errand boys. This organization is formed on the 
principle of dealing directly with the employer and 
in bringing the entire power of the plant to bear 
upon him in the case of dispute. If there is a 
strike it is a strike of all employees and not merely 
of the mechanics or the spindle tenders. So deep- 
rooted is this system of factory solidarity that labor 
organization in Mexico has practically never at- 
tempted to take the form of craft unions known in 
the United States. Instance after instance could 
be cited of the vital significance of this guild and 
factory solidarity, for the guild form of organization 
is the natural development of the industrial system 
of which the hacienda is the parent. 

It would profit little here to go into an exposition 
of the labor legislation which has sought to trans- 
form the industrial system of Mexico in the past 
decade. The Carranza revolution, originally a 
pohtical upheaval with political nostroms for the 
economic and social ills of the people, was changed, 
just prior to the writing of the Constitution of 1917, 
into a socialistic manifestation linked by artificial 
and but poorly understood sympathies with the 
radical movements of Europe and the United 
States. The result of this control of the brains of 
the revolution was the 1917 Constitution with its 
radical labor provisions and the laws which fol- 
lowed, but at this time it would be unfair both to 

346 



CONDITIONS OF LABOR 

these radical philosophers and to the Mexican 
people themselves to conceive that these constitu- 
tional provisions and these laws are actually an 
expression of the ideals and aspirations of Mexican 
labor. As time goes on this labor legislation is 
adapting itself more and more to a certain primal 
communism which is far more Indian than any 
of the modern phases of socialism which are found 
in more completely developed industrial nations. 
It is still too early to determine whether these 
Indian conamunal ideals will dominate the expres- 
sion and the interpretation of the social and in- 
dustrial legislation of the country. We return in 
the observation of this situation to the tendency 
which has been noted again and again in these 
pages — the tendency toward Indianism. The Mex- 
ican radicals, no less than the Mexican conserva- 
tives, must keep watch over the tendencies of their 
people to guard against the swamping of their 
ideas by the tides of that unfathomed sea. 

In discussing the labor problem of Mexico, we 
note only thus briefly the later developments of the 
situation. But again, as throughout this book, the 
search is not for the surface indication nor even the 
apparent tendency of the moment, but for the deep 
underlying forces and the manifestations of those 
unchanging facts which have dominated Mexican 
history in the past, are dominating even its chaos 
of to-day, and will dominate the future, no matter 
whether that future be expressed in terms of Spanish 
conservatism, Indian communism, or modern Euro- 
pean radicalism. 

347 



XI 

INCOME AND THE COST OF LIVING 

MEXICO is a country of low wages; normally it 
is a country of low living costs. In the years 
through which we are now passing, where dollars 
and pounds, francs and pesetas, bounce about like 
bubbles, blown by economic gales and political 
cyclones, all figures of wages and food costs seem 
more significant of general world economics than 
of a nation's own internal conditions. This is 
probably less true in Mexico than elsewhere, how- 
ever, because Mexico with her gold coin and her 
financial isolation has been and still is almost 
unaffected by international exchange. The ele- 
ment of error in a true appreciation of the signifi- 
cance of income and living costs in Mexico is found 
almost alone in the confusion wrought in her life 
by ten years of revolution and by four years, now 
happily ended, of a diabolical abuse of fiat money. 
In our study of the financial side of living condi- 
tions, we seek again the underlying fundamentals, 
the unchanging facts which alone can truly clarify 
past, present, and future. The chief of these funda- 
mentals is the national improvidence. Throughout 

348 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

Mexican history, the rich as a class have overspent 
their incomes; the middle class has emerged in two 
groups, one those whose ambition was to live well 
and look prosperous, and the other engaged in the 
friendly and profitable ''side line" of lending money 
at usurious rates to its fellows of the middle class; 
the poor of Mexico have lived for centuries on the 
poverty line. 

The improvidence of the upper and middle 
classes is largely the result of the social system. 
That of the peon, in whom our interest centers 
here, has more obvious, and more complicated, 
beginnings. His precarious and characteristic po- 
sition on the slippery edge of pauperism seems 
indeed to be more the result of his own choice than 
of the economic faults in the Mexican system. As 
pointed out again and again in these pages, the 
problem of Mexican uplift is a problem of education 
to ambition rather than of producing an economic 
situation which will allow the Mexican to satisfy 
the alleged cravings of generations. Experience 
has taught both the upper-class Mexican and the 
intelhgent foreigner that the lunitation of desires 
manifested in the Mexican peon is in his ov\t.i mental 
repression through generations of race and cycles of 
climate, and has httle or nothing to do with his 
economic condition. 

The peon works only enough days to support 
himself and his family in the most meager fashion. 
The evidence on this point is overwhelming, and 
large employers of labor throughout the country 
have found it necessary to carry a surplus of 25 

349 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

per cent or more on their payrolls in order to guar- 
antee the daily average of workers necessary for the 
prosecution of any piece of work. Therefore the 
peon, working only long enough to satisfy his needs, 
has been able to increase his hoiu*s when food 
increased in price, so that where at one time he 
might have satisfied his wants with three days' 
work per week, he could, with the price of food 
doubled, work six days a week at his old salary 
and still live as well as usual. Only in the past 
few years has the question of wages had a close 
relationship to living expenditures, and this only 
because the rising prices of food, due to the destruc- 
tion of the revolutions far more than to the in- 
creased cost of living the world over, have made it 
impossible for the Mexican sufficiently to increase 
his efficiency by his own choice to make living 
easy, as he has always done in the past. 

Moreover, conservative Mexican economists have 
long insisted that the country's social problems 
have no striking or general economic parallel. 
Typical of the reports on this point is one made to 
the Segunda Semana Agricola (an agrarian con- 
ference held in Mexico City in 1912), which stated 
that in the low-wage district of the state of San 
Luis Potosi the peons were not addicted to drink, 
concubinage was comparatively rare, rehgion and 
education were on a relatively high plane, the 
children wore clothes, were usually kept clean, and 
the peons themselves were well dressed and gener- 
ally free from sickness, and, above all, usury was 
practically unknown. By contrast, in the state of 

350 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

Morelos, where wages were relatively high (PI to 
PI. 50), drimkenness was very conmion, concubinage 
was widespread, there was practically no religious 
or school instruction of the peon, hygienic condi- 
tions were very bad, and usury was rampant, 
monthly interests of 3 per cent to 8 per cent being 
collected. The parallel was carried through many 
sections, with the general conclusion that the scale 
of wages had almost no effect on the standard of 
living, except where cynical observation found that 
vice and not improved Uving followed increased 
wages. 

Much of the confused personal economics of 
Mexico is also due to the fact that the soiu-ces of 
income do not follow conventional divisions. The 
national wealth was originally created by mines 
and agriculture and concentrated by trade and 
revolutionary brigandage, while land, even under 
modern conditions, has been almost the sole recog- 
nized repository of investment for the national 
wealth. Industrial development (including mining 
since it became an industry and not a form of 
adventure and speculation) has been brought about 
almost entirely by foreign capital, for it is an axiom 
of those long resident in Mexico that a Mexican 
will not invest in industrial and pubhc service 
enterprises except on a small scale in conjunction 
with quantities of foreign money. Mexico's banks 
draw almost none of their capital from savings and 
little from the increment of national wealth. 
Almost the only method, aside from farms, by 
which capital is ''produced" may be said to be 

23 351 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

usurious interest collected either by banks or by in- 
dividuals. The result is that the income of the 
upper classes is largely from land and farming of 
various sorts, from definite inheritances, and from 
usury. Their only other source of income is from 
personal service, in the professions and in govern- 
ment posts. These returns have never been high, 
and save for the foreign companies which paid well 
for their representation by Mexican lawyers, the 
salaries and fees obtained by upper-class pro- 
fessional men have certainly never been producers 
of capital. 

In the middle classes there was under the Diaz 
peace a growing opportunity in salaried positions 
and in the mechanical arts. The largest divisions 
of this group were indeed a product of the economic 
system nurtured under Diaz, and the reactionary 
instincts of this class which could hope to advance 
or even to exist only in an industrial community 
have been one of the stabihzing forces acting upon 
the new revolution. Their conservatism is, in fact, 
largely responsible for the modicum of success which 
Carranza obtained during his four years of rule. 
The middle class, however, suffered most during the 
paper-money^ orgies of Carranza, but it gained 
something in the advances in salary which, however 
inadequate under paper-money conditions, were 
usually maintained after a stable currency was 
again established. This situation applies to gov- 
ernment clerks, even to school teachers, and to the 
skilled artisans of railways, shops, smelters, and 
mines. 

352 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

The lower classes, whose living conditions must 
of necessity be taken as the national index, have 
but one source of income, their physical efforts. 
They live eternally on the poverty line, with their 
small needs, their ability to reduce their require- 
ments to meet almost any limitation, and their 
apathetic lack of interest in anything beyond 
that actually required, combining to save them from 
starvation. 

The history of wages in Mexico can be traced 
through the earnings of the peons from the time 
of the Aztecs down to the present. Under the 
Indian theocracies there was no wage system, the 
production of food being almost entirely on the 
communistic plan, and distribution was carried 
on by barter. The Spaniards perpetuated the 
features of the Aztec system which were convenient 
to them, and labor was practically unpaid through 
the early years of the colonial period. This system 
was thoroughly well established before the use of 
money became general among the lower classes, 
and was only gradually broken down. How- 
ever, Baron von Humboldt stated (and this is 
the earliest record of peon wages which we have) 
that the agricultural laborer in 1804 received about 
28 centavos per day. During the revolutions 
wages fell, reaching the level of 123^2 centavos per 
day in most sections of the republic, although in 
certain parts they were as high as 37 centavos. 
In 1878 the average of wages for the country was 
18 to 37 centavos. In 1884 wages ran from 25 to 

37 centavos, fluctuations being very slight over the 

353 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

whole country. Up to the 'eighties, Mexican silver 
money was practically on a par with Anaerican 
gold, but from 1890 on the value drops to ap- 
proximately half. Wages did not rise, however, 
as silver depreciated, and up to 1900 the usual daily 
wage was 37 centavos for men, and for women and 
children from 10 to 25 centavos. Carpenters, 
furniture makers, etc., received 62 centavos, and 
the head workmen PI and up. Policemen earned 
PI daily, clerks from P15 to P25 monthly, although 
in banks and railroads the salaries were somewhat 
higher. Govermnent employees earned from PlOO 
to PI 50; judges received P4,000 a year; heads of 
Federal departments P8,000, and state governors 
P15,000. 

The period of prosperity and labor shortage 
which marked the last decade of the Diaz rule pro- 
duced an upward tendency in wages which placed 
the probable minimum at 50 centavos per day in 
the crowded agricultural sections of the plateau, 
and in the plantation districts caused the rate to 
reach 75 centavos to PI, an increase also found 
in the mines of the north. During the recent 
revolutionary period, and especially during the 
paper-money orgies before there was any adjust- 
ment of wages, the peon worker on farms and in the 
mines would have found life absolutely impossible 
except for the fact that his relationship to his 
employer provided for the furnishing of most of the 
food which he ate. In the cities the conditions 
were such that undoubted thousands, particularly 

the children, died of starvation. There were, 

354 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

however, at that tune considerable increases in 
salaries for the workers who continued at their 
jobs, and to-day the average wage for the peons has 
generally risen to PI. 50, the minimuin wage under 
the new labor laws of many of the states — an 
increase of 50 per cent to 200 per cent. 

In vocations other than that of day laborers, the 
increase in wages has been steadier. The following 
comparisons in three cotton-mill sections picture 
the condition clearly. 



Year 


Federal District 


Jalisco 


PUKBLA 


1879 


P0.6S 
0.91 
1.00 
2.00-3.00 


P0.52 
0.62 
1.00 
2.00-3.00 


P0.47 


1896 


0.84 


1909 


1.00 


1919 


2.00-3.00 







There has been a progressive rise in the wages 
paid to railroad workers. When construction began 
in the 'eighties common laborers received 25 to 50 
centavos; foremen, 75 centavos to PI per day. In 
1907 the contractors of the Southern Pacific of 
Mexico paid their grade laborers PI. 25 to PI. 75 per 
day. In the higher ranks of the railway service 
no comparison is just, because the majority of con- 
ductors and engineers and all of the officials were 
Americans who received American wages, and when 
they were finally exiled from the country the de- 
mands of the Mexican workmen and the national 
spirit resulted in the Mexicans who took their 
places practically doubling their salaries by getting 
the same as had been paid the Americans in similar 

355 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

positions. This fact has also had a great deal to 
do with the increase in the wages of skilled me- 
chanics in the railway and other shops in Mexico. 
American conductors and engineers used to receive 
P320 to P400 per month, and American mechanics in 
the shops received the same union wages that they 
would have received in the United States, so that 
to-day less competent Mexican conductors, en- 
ginemen, and mechanics are receiving wages of from 
P8 to P15 per day. 

The wage situation in Mexico has been more 
generally misunderstood than perhaps any other 
phase of Mexican observation. This was due to a 
large extent, during the time of Diaz, first to the 
broadcast advertising of Mexico's cheap labor 
which accompanied the bid for foreign investments 
at that time, and, second, to the misinformation 
regarding living conditions which was transmitted 
to American tourists. The following table of 
wages in Mexico, with two comparisons with Eng- 
land and Germany during 1905 (which is taken as 
a normal era in all three countries) will be illumin- 
ating in this connection: 

DAILY WAGES IN PESOS 



Farm 

laborers . 
Mechanics 
Railway 

laborers . 
Mill hands 
Miners .... 



Mexico 



1880 



.18- .60 
1.50 

.25- .50 
.12- .50 
.25- .75 



1895 



.18- .75 
1.00-3.00 



.12-1.00 
.25-1.00 



.25-1.25 
2.00-3.00 

1.25-1.75 

.25-2.00 

1.00-1. .50 



1910 



.50-1.25 
2.50-4.75 

1.25-2.00 

.25-2.00 

2.00-3.00 



1918 



1.00-2.00 
4.00-8.00 

2.00-2.50 

.50-3.00 

2..50-3.50 



Ger- 
many 



1905 



1.50-1.75 
1.30-2.68 



Great 
Britain 



1905 



1.50-1.75 
2.60-2.92 



356 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING ' 

The clerk class in Mexico has always been poorly- 
paid, employees in the dry-goods stores, in the 
government departments, and in banks being con- 
tented with salaries of from P15 to P125 a month 
under the Diaz regime, and upon this sum main- 
taining a social position, wearing European clothes, 
and enjoying the comforts of life with a nonchalance 
which only Mexico seems able to inspire. As 
everywhere, this class has received the smallest 
proportional increase during the recent period of 
readjustment, the rise being to P200 per month as a 
maximum. 

The Mexican school-teacher, like so many of his 
brethren in other lands, has never been well paid, 
the new law of 1919 placing the salaries of teachers 
in the Mexican City schools at from P3.09 to 
P3.66 a day for normal-school graduates, the latter 
figure being the maximum — a possible PlOO a 
month! Previous to the recent law the wages were 
higher, temporarily, but this figure is a just indica- 
tion of middle-class salaries in the profession of 
teaching. Some of the states paid slightly better, 
in special instances. 

At the basis of the question of how the Mexican 

lives upon the wages which he receives lies the 

system of perquisites which belongs to the hacienda 

system. Peonage is founded upon the support of 

the laborer by the hacendado, who, no matter what 

the cost of food, always stands between his workers 

and starvation. This system does not begin with 

the peon, however. In the great farming districts 

of Mexico before the present revolution, one could 

357 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

find many significant survivals of the Spanish 
regime, affecting the hacendado and ranchero as well 
as the peon. Beginning at the top, we find that the 
hacendado usually worked with practically no 
capital except the credit of his hacienda. Where 
he needed money for improvements, for the support 
of his town establishment, or for travel abroad, he 
could obtain it by a mortgage from a bank, the 
church, or a wealthy friend. For the actual upkeep 
of his hacienda, however, and for the maintenance 
of his army of peons between the periods of harvest, 
he depended upon the Spanish merchant or whole- 
sale dealer, whose own credit enabled him to do this 
indirect form of banking for the hacendado. The 
latter, by pledging his entire crop to this Spanish 
merchant in the nearest commercial center, was 
able to buy on credit farm implements, seeds, sup- 
plies of cloth and trinlcets, and even com and beans, 
for his peons in times of shortage. When the crop 
came in, it was all delivered to this local Spanish 
merchant, who credited it, sometimes honestly and 
sometimes unfairly, and either turned over the 
cash balance to the hacendado or kept it against 
future drafts, the merchant thus making at least 
three profits, one on his sale of goods, one on the 
interest he charged for his money, and one on the 
handUng of the crop. 

The hacendado, having got supplies on credit 
from the town merchant, in turn sold them on credit 
to his peons. The hacienda storekeeper, usually a 
young Spaniard, was conversant with the needs of 

practically all the peons on the hacienda and kept 

353 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

their accounts as well as maintaining the store. 
During famine periods and during the paper-money 
times when food and all classes of supplies soared 
in price, it was this system, reaching from the Span- 
ish storekeeper through the hacendado down to the 
peon, that made life in interior Mexico possible. 

In addition to these food and goods advances, the 
farm peon since olden times had made it a custom 
to borrow small smus of money for emergencies, for 
festivals, and for his annual outfitting. The com- 
pany store and the loan system are the chief per- 
quisites of the farm peon. Where the wage does 
not include free sustenance, corn is sold at a fixed 
price, always below the market, and even in times 
of shortage, such as famine or revolution, many 
hacendados have continued to sell at prices a third 
of the market quotations or less, thus sustaining the 
purchasing value of the peon's wages and contribut- 
ing vitally to the equilibration of the cost of living. 

In most haciendas there are other perquisites; in 
the pulque-pToducing sections the laborer is given 
a daily allowance of pulque which he may either 
sell or drink. On practically all haciendas the 
house, or at least the land upon v/hich the peon may 
build his own hovel, is given him without rent, and 
those peons who are regarded as family retainers 
are always allowed the small milpa, or corn patch, 
which they cultivate for their own account, the 
crop being bought by the hacendado or harvested 
by the peon for his own use. 

All this belongs in any fair estimate of the peon's 
income. Thus a typical low-caste peon who a few 

359 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

years ago received but 13 centavos a day in the 
state of Chiapas may be estimated to be getting in 
reality nearly 50 centavos a day, if we count 
perquisites and the interest on his debt — ^no heavier 
than the hacendado pays the Spanish merchant. 
This peon is bound by a P400 debt, but although 
his cash wages are at the rate of 13 centavos a day, 
his salary, food, and perquisites amount to P14.58 
a month. This is given him as follows:^ 

Cash P4:oo 

500 ears of corn 3.31 

20 pounds of beans 0.62 

Lime for preparation of corn 0.07 

House rent 1.00 

Medicines 1.00 

Use of land for corn patch 0.33 

2 per cent on P200 (half the debt) 4.00 

2 bottles of alcohol 0.25 

Total P14.58 

The mitigating factors which save the economic 
situation for the peon on the haciendas are paralleled 
to a certain extent in the communal hfe of the 
Indian villages where the workers in the fields 
produce the food for the village, and yet at the 
same tune have leisure, either during the unproduc- 
tive months or after working hours, for making the 
native specialties of their own village, pottery, 
baskets, hats, or hand-woven wool or cotton. 

Tiuning to the living conditions of the city 
dweller, we enter a field where perquisites are un- 
known and no kindly patron bars the door against 
want. The narrow margin on which the city peon 

^ Informes y Documentos, no. 4, Secretaria de Fomento, 1885. 

360 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

lives, and his continued existence, need, indeed, 
explanations which no figures can give. For in- 
stance, in Mexico City in 1919 the average peon 
workman earned PI. 50 a day — that is, P37.50 a 
month, exclusive of Sundays — and yet the rent for 
the single room in the wretched quarter of the city 
where alone he could afford shelter cost him PIO, or 
27 per cent of his income. His entire income per 
day could not possibly buy him meat under the 
prices prevailing, and his diet, therefore, had to con- 
sist of tortillas, beans, and chile, to V\^hich he added 
pulque, as alcohol is traditionally the substitute for 
energy to underfed humanity. The peon and his 
family can buy such food, and the charcoal with 
which to cook it, for not one bit less than 50 per 
cent of his daily income. Shoes, clothes, and hats 
at second-hand for him. and his family can be esti- 
mated at P5 per month, 13 per cent of his income. 
The remaining 10 per cent, or 15 centavos a day, 
will hardly pay for soap at P2 a kilo, and leaves no 
margin whatever for the loss of pay which he will 
suffer if unable or unwilling to work a steady six 
days a week.^ 

Even going back to happier times in 1910 when 
the city laborer received 75 centavos a day and yet 
when his living expenses were considerably less, we 
might make a more complicated division of his in- 
come. If at 75 centavos a day he worked six days a 
week for fifty weeks a year, his year's income would 
be P225. Fiestas and other interruptions to work 
would undoubtedly cut down his average to five 

^ Gazeta del Dpto. de Trabajo, November, 1919. 
361 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

days a week and to forty-five weeks a year, giving 
him an income of P168.75. To this might possibly 
be added money brought in by the woman of the 
family, at 35 centavos a day for five days a week, 
adding P87.50 a year, raising the family income to 
P256.25. If the children were working, this might 
possibly be raised to P300 annually. In 1910 rent 
might have been P5 a month or even as low as P2 
in some of the quarters of the cities, or P24 a year; 
to cut down the amount spent for clothes to the very 
minimum estimate, P25 a year for the entire family, 
would, added to the daily ration of pulque, 4 cen- 
tavos a day, or P14 a year, and 4 centavos' worth of 
cigarettes, another P14, give a total for all expenses, 
excluding food, of P77, allowing the almost impos- 
sible minimum of rent, P2 a month. From the 
minimum income of 75 centavos a day there is 
thus left P91.75, or about 25 centavos a day, for 
food, while if the entire family is working the daily 
average for food is 60 centavos, which, divided 
among the average family of six people, means 10 
centavos a day per individual. It seems, in con- 
templating the cold figures of the city peon's 
budget, as if it were impossible for him to exist, and 
yet exist he does, even though his children die like 
flies and his wife grows old at thirty and reaches her 
grave by forty — and he exists without working all 
of the five days a week we have allowed him! 

We can carry our view of the Mexican family 
budget into ranks of society a little higher. In the 
days of Diaz clerks received from P20 to PI 25 per 
month, carpenters from PI. 50 to P2.50 a day, or 

362 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

from P36 a month to P60 a month. Shelter is 
a larger item in this lower middle class. - In the 
cities where they are found rents ranged, in the old 
days, from P8 per month for two small rooms, up- 
ward. The clothes item lil^ewise is larger because 
the nature of their work requires better personal 
appearance. If the Mexican clerk at P60 works 
twelve months a year he has an income of P720. A 
rent expenditure of P12 a month will amount to 
P150. The clothing for his family cannot concerv^- 
ably be less than PlOO because he must wear shoes, 
he must wear respectable suits and shirts, likewise 
the wife will need some slight adornment and their 
children must be dressed for school. The food costs 
of such a family will run from a peso a day up, 
varying according to income. 

These necessarily crude estimates indicate two 
things : first, that by the standards of the foreigner 
the Mexican peon Hves actually helow the poverty 
line; and second, that the middle-class Mexican is 
emerging by the help of the low peon standards 
which give him an advantage in living costs and 
make him approach independence because he 
still hves in cheap quarters, his appetite is satisfied 
with relatively cheap foods, and his clothing, while 
of different cut, is still made according to native 
standards and by native workmen. 

A glance at the prices for food, shelter, clothing, 

and cleanliness will clarify this point. Primarily, 

living expense depends on food costs. In the 

chapter on Mexico's foods, above, the unity of the 

Mexican diet was noted. The middle classes 

363 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

follow very closely the diet of the peon, save for 
more meats and, of course, greater care ui prepara- 
tion. Let us study the food prices in Mexico at 
different periods: 



Food Prices in Mexico and New York^ 
(In Mexican Currency) 



Beef (best), pound 

Beef (other cuts) 

Pork, pound 

Lamb (goat in Mexico) 

Black sugar, pound. . . 

Sugar, pound 

Lard, pound 

Butter (Mex.), pound. 

Butter (Am.), pound. . 

Coffee, pound 

Eggs, each 

Milk, quart 

Corn, bushel 

Wheat flour, pound . . . 

Corn meal (wet in 
Mex., dry in N. Y.), 
pound 

Bread, pound 

Beans, pound 

Rice, pound 

Potatoes, pound 

Onions, pound 






P.14 
.12 
.16 



.10 



.38 



1.00 
.02 



.10 






P.24 

.22 
.28 



.20 



.52 
.76 
.44 
.02 



2.24 
.10 



.06 
.14 
.06 






P.18 



2.00 
.34 



3.00 
.10 



.04 
.16 



P.22 



.08 
.08 
.30 



.22 
'.OS 



.03 
.16 
.06 






P.42 



.28 

.32 

1.10 



.26 
'.14 



.08 
.40 
.20 
.24 



c 9 



Pl.OO 
.50 
.60 
.36 



.40 

.80 

1.30 

2.50 

.50 

.16 

.30 

8.00 

.30 






P.84 
.70 
.80 
.64 



.20 
.80 



1.22 
.78 
.10 
.30 

4.20 
.16 



.14 
.20 
.24 
.28 
.10 
.26 



^ New York and Mexico prices of 1891, from Matias Romero, 
Mexico and the United States, 1895; Mexican prices for 1901, from 
U. S. Bulletin of Department of Labor, No. 38, January, 1902; 
for 1910 and 1918, from Boletin de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo, 
November-December, 1918; for Monterrey, 1919, from the 
writer's consular reports; for New York, 1919, from World 
Almanac, 1920. 

364 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

The relatively small difference between food 
prices in Mexico and New York always strikes the 
foreign student, but this is of itself proof of the 
fact that the Mexican peon, at least, lives on less, 
or wastes less of the food that he has, than does the 
American. As long ago as 1803 Baron von Hum- 
boldt stated that "the Indians, like the inhabitants 
of Hindustan, are contented with the smallest 
quantity of aliment on which life can be supported, 
and increase in number without a proportional 
increase in the means of subsistence."^ Moreover, 
the worst of foods are consumed freely, food adul- 
teration is universal, and tallow serves many thou- 
sands in place of lard in cooking. In the time of 
Diaz, the low-caste peons of Mexico City lived 
literally on 10 centavos a day, paying for their 
frugality by the shortness of their lives, to be sure, 
but living their brief span, nevertheless. 

Shelter is actually a small item in Mexico, al- 
though where the peon on his tiny wage has a 
''home," the cost is disproportional. Previous to 
1910, the vile rooms in the Mexican city tenements 
cost PI. 50 up per month, while to-day the minimmn 
is about P5. In the slightly higher classes rents 
increase, but Httle more is given for the money. 
At the beginning of the century, little apartments or 
houses of three or four rooms could be had for P8 to 
P12 per month; in 1910 two rooms cost as much; 
in 1920 the cost of two rooms was up to P15. And 
these had very few of the conveniences which the 

^ Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of 
New Spain, book ii, chap, v, p. 118. 

365 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

American or European worlonan would consider 
necessities, such as light, running water, and good 
toilets, and, of course, with no real bathroom. 
Other houses of several rooms cost, in 1910, up to 
PlOO per month, and in 1918 brought P150 to P200. 
Fuel hardly enters into the cost of shelter in Mexico, 
because practically none of the houses are heated, 
though oil stoves are used by some residents of 
the highlands. In 1910 kerosene cost 12 centavos 
a liter, and 22 centavos in 1918. Kerosene is 
generally used for lighting in the middle classes, but 
candles are even more common; paraffin candles 
cost, in 1910, 33 centavos a kilogram (about 16 
cvos. a pound), and in 1918 were 94 centavos a kilo. 
Charcoal, ahnost universally used for cooking, was 
2 centavos a kilo in 1910 and 4 centavos in 1918.^ 

The cost of cleanliness in Mexico is difficult to 
estimate. Laundries are not common, practically 
all of the washing being done by peon women, who 
make their charges by time and the cost of soap. 
The latter item almost quadrupled in price between . 
1910 and 1918, having been 25 centavos a kilo in 
the former year and 85 in the latter, and was tem- 
porarily up to P2 in 1919. The cost of public 
baths, of the lower type at least, had advanced but 
sUghtly, the price of one bath in 1910 having been 
25 centavos, and 30 in 1918. 

The basic item in clothing is the price of un- 
bleached muslin, which, in 1910, was 14 centavos a 
meter (thirty-nine inches), 30 centavos in 1918, and 

1 Figures from Boletin de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo, Novem- 
ber-December, 1918. 

366 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

35 in 1920. Blue duck was 40 centavos a meter in 
1910, 87 in June, 1918, and P1.98 in February, 1920. 
The prices of clothing have always been regulated 
in Mexico by the costs of the imported material, 
and dm-ing the Great War American prices, plus 
increased duties, determined the cost, where nor- 
mally the European market, and not the American, 
is the chief factor. Prior to the 1910 revolution, 
imported European fabrics made clothing of all 
sorts far cheaper in Mexico than in the United 
States, the prices comparing favorably with Europe. 
A native-made man's suit of the finest EngHsh 
woolens could be had for P35. Paris dresses of all 
sorts, lingerie, and gloves were virtually the same 
price in silver as they were in the United States in 
gold, making the cost exactly half in Mexico. The 
best shoes were always American, and paid a duty 
averaging PI. 50 per pair, but where native-made 
textiles cost only a few cents less than the European 
(the Mexican manufacturer takes full advantage of 
his "protection"), Mexican-made shoes have always 
been cheaper than American, owing to their de- 
cidedly inferior quahty. In 1910 native shoes sold 
for about P5, in 1918 for P7, and in 1920 for PIO 
per pair. 

Even with such wages and prices, however, the 
problem of existence in Mexico is decidedly simpler 
than in more advanced lands. The food problem 
is solved for many millions by the mere fact that 
they live upon the soil, and in some sections of the 
country there is an abundance of native fruits and 
game, although tropical fruits (despite Baron von 

24 367 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Humboldt's enthusiasm for the banana, more than 
a century ago), are not alone sufficient to sustain 
human life, and corn has to be grown for food. 
Shelter in the country costs the worker nothmg, 
fuel is needed only for cooking, and clothing is 
hardly required for warmth, the zerape, or blanket, 
handed down from generation to generation, pro- 
viding both cloak and bed covering. 

The lot of the city dweller is, as everywhere, more 
complicated, but even there the most serious prob- 
lems seem to have to do with the lack of perquisites 
to fill out the gaps of his economic life and the lack 
of credit which on the hacienda is alike his "savings " 
system and his provision for emergencies. As a 
substitute, the city dweller has recourse only to the 
pawnshops and to the private money lenders of his 
own or the higher classes. From the national 
pawnshop or Monte de Piedad (literally ''Mount of 
Charity") and its many branches, down to the 
usurious hovels in the back streets, Mexican pawn- 
brokers will advance money on practically any- 
thing, literally to the shirt off the peon's back. 
The use of pawnshops as a means of raising money 
has always been common in all classes of Mexicans. 
The Monte de Piedad was founded in 1774 by the 
Conde de Regla, and for many years was operated 
on a basis of voluntary contributions, no interest 
being charged, but after a time these were found to 
be inadequate, and in 1873 interest was placed at 
6 per cent a year, and later at 1 per cent a month. 
Branches of the national pawnshop are established 
all over the city, and loans are made from 25 cen- 

368 



INCOME AND COST OF LIVING 

tavos up to P2,000. In addition to the national 
pawnshop, however, there have been innmnerable 
private estabhshments. Regulations controlling 
usury were enforced more or less consistently 
previous to the revolution, although the scarcity of 
money and the difficulties of administration under 
recent governments and with various currencies 
brought many abuses. 

There has always been a considerable amount of 
usurious money lending on the part of clerks and 
middle-class proprietors. Mexican stores are often 
hung with relatively new goods which are not for 
sale, but which are pledges left by customers or 
friends for small loans. The interest collected is 
always high, rimning up to 20 per cent a month, the 
loan being upon a valuation of a quarter of the 
price of the article pledged. 

Custom, climate, and hiunan nature thus com- 
bine to perpetuate the condition noted at the be- 
ginning of this chapter, that the Mexicans as a 
people live always on the poverty line. The 
economic system is based in principle on a closeness 
to the soil, an intimate, primitive conception that 
persists even in the higher classes, despite modem 
civilization and the slow encroachment of modern 
business. This factor makes such data as are avail- 
able seemingly intangible and incomplete, and yet 
the very incompleteness, the very confusion of the 
material, the very lack of understanding of the 
Mexicans who have gathered it, are themselves 
indices of how shadowy and primeval is the realm 
in which the mass of the population lives. Almost 

369 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

nothing in Mexico is so difficult to grasp wholly 
as the mere continued existence of the unthinking 
millions of the peons in the face of living costs and 
the incomes with which they have to meet their 
problems. Here, once again, the vast, inert mass 
drops its dead weight upon the shoulders of those 
who would save and succor. Back into the dim 
recesses of dull minds and solemn misery we must 
reach, again, to educate, to upraise, some day to 
bring about greater production, broader needs, 
deeper, finer desires. 



XII 

VICES, CRIME, AND PACJPEEISM 

THE philosopher's stone which through all his- 
tory has transmuted the dross of barbarism 
into the gold of civilization is self-control. In the 
races and race mixtures and above all in the climate 
of Mexico self-control does not shine as an over- 
mastering virtue, so that a perhaps disproportional 
place is occupied by the nonsocial phases of her 
life — her vices, crimes, and pauperism. For what- 
ever their original roots, the development of aU 
of these along characteristically national lines is 
certainly traceable to an almost uncontrolled ac- 
ceptance of all the temptations which come to the 
individual or characterize his environment. 

The chief vices of Mexico are three, all the result' 
of unrestrained impulse: gambling, drimkenness, 
and sexual overindulgence. The last, which seems 
far more responsible for the Mexican lack of effi- 
ciency than any other single factor of the national 
life, is probably as much due to the climate and to 
overstimulating diet as to any special race ten- 
dencies in either Indian or Spaniard. But gambling 

and drinking have distinct racial correlations. 

371 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The Spaniard has always been the inveterate 
gambler of the world and a proverb in Mexico is to 
the effect that it is the Spaniard and the mestizo 
who gamble, and the Indian who drinks. The 
limitation is not literally true, for while probably 
the chief abusers on the side of gaming are those 
of mixed blood, no Indian, if he has any money, will 
miss an opportunity to bet on a cock fight or to risk 
a few centavos on a hazard of the open-air roulette 
wheel which is a feature of all his festivals. There 
were gambling systems in Mexico under the Aztecs, 
but it was the Spaniards who introduced gaming 
houses and the European gambhng devices now in 
vogue. These came down through all the revolu- 
tionary epochs to that of Diaz, and ''the casino" 
in Tacubaya, a Mexico City suburb, was as famous 
in its way as the smaller gambling palaces of Europe 
such as Enghien and Ostend. The Tacubaya casino 
was suppressed under Diaz, and the gambling houses 
in the city itself followed, so that after 1900 the 
capital was thoroughly "cleaned up." Gambling 
was openly revived under Huerta and it is said that 
in 1913 Huerta himself was the chief proprietor of 
the principal gambling houses open to varying 
classes of society. After his fall, unofficial gambling 
concessions were perquisites of many revolutionary 
"generals." 

The clubs of Mexico have always been largely 

supported by their gambling tables, where roulette 

and baccarat were carried on, for the members only, 

even in the time of Diaz. This was the upper-class 

outlet for the gambling fever and the lower class 

372 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

had to content itself with private games of *'monte" 
and the little wheels at the fiestas, though from 
time to time one could find gambling houses running 
full blast for brief periods in large cities, and almost 
always in connection with popular fairs. Under 
the recent revolutionary governments gambling 
was allowed and even encouraged as a source of 
revenue, and in some of the states long persisted 
under government protection. 

We cannot estimate the extent of gambhng by 
figures, but before Diaz and since it has been 
rampant in a hundred forms. As this is written, the 
new fortunes of the "generals" of the recent revolu- 
tions are being dissipated in gambling as much as 
in the support of spectacular mistresses of the dance 
haUs and concert stage, and the example extends on 
down through all classes. Great gambling haUs 
(many of them in tents, to be sm-e, but elaborate and 
animated, nevertheless) fill the suburbs of the 
capital, and, although ostensibly under cover, are 
quite as open as need be. The gambling conces- 
sions of Tijuana (Lower California) and of Juarez, 
opposite El Paso, Texas, are known to all the 
sporting fraternity of the American continent. 

Lotteries have run in Mexico for years, except 
for a short period under Carranza, the revival com- 
ing long before his fall. Throughout the Diaz 
regime two lotteries in the capital had government 
protection, for which they paid substantial taxes. 
A few state lotteries were also operated and the 
tickets for all of these were sold by stores and itiner- 
ant venders in every corner of the republic. There 

373 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

were two drawings weekly of the national lotteries, 
and the prizes ranged from P500,000 down to 
PI, 200, tickets for all drawings being sold in sec- 
tions, some for a few centavos, and the percentage 
of possible gain was very little greater in proportion 
to the investment for the large drawings than it was 
for the small ones. In addition to the Mexican 
lotteries tickets for the Christmas and Easter draw- 
ings in Spain, the capital prizes of which were 
P500,000, were freely sold in Mexico. 

Apparently the lottery filled a public demand for 
an opportunity to gain a few thousand per cent 
on a small investment. In 1907, when the Mexico 
City Tramways Company wished to keep a check 
upon its conductors and do away with their con- 
tinual petty thievery, it devised a lottery scheme. 
In paying his fare the passenger received from the 
conductor a numbered ticket indicating the amount 
paid, and this was a possible winner in a monthly 
lottery in which the holders of lucky mmibers were 
given prizes as high as P500. It was estimated that 
the lottery cost in the neighborhood of Po,000 per 
month, but as long as the novelty lasted the com- 
pany apparently felt well repaid for this investment, 
because at first every Mexican who rode on a tram 
demanded his ticket in return for his fare, on the 
distant chance that his six centavos might win him 
a prize of PIO. 

In approaching the subject of drinking, it must 
be pointed out that most decidedly the upper and 
even the middle class Mexicans are in no sense 
slaves to liquor. There is, of course, much drinking 

374 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

at Mexican festivals and in Mexican homes, but 
this is done much as druiking is observed in 
Europe — that is, a light wine with the meal and 
cognac or liqueur following dinner, or a heavier 
wine and cakes as a refreshment. 

But all who know the Mexican Indian describe 
his consumption of alcohohc liquors as the chief 
feature of his festivals. In Mexico City the pulque 
saloons are the centers of the celebrations and of the 
mournings of the Indians and the peons. On hoU- 
days the drinking begins on the night previous and 
continues until the festival is over, as, for instance, 
from Saturday night imtil Monday morning, which 
accounts for the proverbial inability of the Mexican 
to work on Monday, which is celebrated gloomily 
as San Lunes (St. Monday's Day). 

The attitude of the educated people in Mexico 

toward this overindulgence in Hquor is extremely 

tolerant, due to custom and also to the fact that 

drunkenness is regarded as a form of comfort that 

it seems cruel to deny the unhappy Indian. The 

attitude of the Mexican toward intoxicating Hquors 

is, indeed, not complicated by any moral code or 

deep appreciation of the laws of hygiene. Even the 

higher classes regard the use of stimulants as 

natural, and the climate is always the handy excuse 

for indulgence. On the plateau one needs a cbpita 

to stir one's energy in the lethargic hours of the 

day; in the hot country it is perilous to take cooling 

drinks unless they contain alcohol ''to warm the 

stomach after its sudden chill." 

The Spaniard is said to have introduced alcohoj 
375 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

drinking among the Indians, for previous to the 
colonial epoch control was theoretically very strict, 
only the nobility and old people being allowed to 
imbibe even pulque. The native liquors of Mexico 
are most of them (excepting rum) made from 
various species of the great-leaved agave (the aloe, 
or century plant), which also gives Mexico her chief 
agricultural product, the henequen fiber. The na- 
tive distilled liquors are mezcal and tequila (an 
especially esteemed form of mezcal), made from 
minor members of the agave family, and aguardiente, 
the native name for the rum made from sugar cane. 
The chief fermented drink is pulque, manufactured < 
from the sap which the lordly maguey, the king of 
aU the agaves, pours forth in endless gallons when, 
just before flowering, after seven years of growth, 
the root of what would be a fifteen-foot flower-stock 
is dug out. This sap, cured by traditional and none 
too cleanly processes, is drunk in vast quantities by 
the natives of the plateau country. As it has to be 
drunlc; at a certain stage of fermentation, fortunately 
for the rest of Mexico it cannot be shipped off the 
plateau, and is known only in the Valley of Mexico 
and in parts of the plateau states of Puebla, Hidalgo, 
Tlaxcala, etc. While pulque is a decided intoxicant, 
according to Mexican medical theories the stupor 
which results from drinking it is due more to the 
continuance of the process of fermentation in the 
stomach and the consequent setting up of a toxic 
condition than to the mere presence of alcohol. 
The effect of the enormous consumption of pulque 

is a byword among all who have had to deal with 

376 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

laborers in the highlands of the republic, un- 
doubtedly much of their stupidity, inefficiency, and 
unreliability being traceable directly to the enor- 
mous consmnption of this debilitating beverage. 
Not least of its accompanying evils, however, is the 
devotion of thousands of acres of the finest land of 
Mexico to the raising of maguey plants for its manu- 
facture. The pulque trains which come into Mexico 
City each morning total daily more than 100 cars, 
many times the milk trains M^hich are puny rivals of 
the 'pulque traffic. More than P20,000 a day passed 
over the counters of the 2,000 vilely dirty pulquerias 
(or pulque saloons) of the capital during the time of 
Diaz, and the government revenue from the business 
was nearly PI, 000,000 a year. Under Carranza, the 
pulque traffic, like the lotteries, was temporarily 
suspended, but was revived, owing to the need of 
revenues, heavier taxes raising the retail price 
from the three to four centavos a quart which it com- 
manded in the time of Diaz to eight and ten cen- 
tavos. The total production of pulque in Mexico 
under Diaz was about P8,000,000 annually. 

The production and local consmnption of dis- 
tilled liquors totaled in 1910 about the same as 
that of pulque, some P8,000,000, while importations 
of wines and liquors were worth nearly P3, 500,000. 
There was a growing use of beer, the manufacture 
of which the Diaz government encouraged as a 
measure against pulque drinking, but the total 
consumption was relatively low as compared with 
pulque and distilled Uquors. 

The abuse of alcohol on the part of the low-class 

377 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Mexicans can hardly be overstated. One of the 
keenest and frankest Mexican analysts of his 
people has written of them: 

When a Mexican has any trouble he goes to a pulqueria to 
talk it over with a friend. In the morning he Hkes his capita 
for a starter. Children taste alcoholic drinks out of their 
fathers' glasses. On fete days bloody assaults are frequent, 
due to drunkenness. Mexico used to be free of the sight of a 
drunken woman up to 1876, but since then, unfortunately, the 
increasing proportions are alarming. To-day we have a na- 
tional type of psychiatric (men and women). They particu- 
larly drink tequila and do not show drunken effects, but their 
nerves are shattered, their disposition becomes most irritable, 
everyone annoys them, a look from anyone seems insulting 
to them. Their eyes are dejected, their hair is thin (men lose 
their beards), their color is yellow, the pulse is shaky, they are 
nauseated in the mornings, they eat only meat and rice, they 
work only in a cloud of smoke and alcohol.^ 

A movement toward temperance in Mexico and 
even toward the prohibition of the sale of intoxi- 
cants gained some headway under Carranza. It 
was largely political, but there was sm'prising lack 
of opposition, and Mexican liquor dealers frankly 
admit to-day that national prohibition is only a 
matter of time. Probably no country would re- 
spond so splendidly to such a change, for not only 
would the health and spirit of the people benefit, 
but enforcement would be easy. The Mexican of 
the lower classes is accustomed to taking what is 
given him, and if liquor is taken away from him he 
would doubtless accept it with the same stoicism 
with which he accepts everything else. 

^ Julio Guerrero, in La Genesis del Crimen en Mexico. 

378 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

Two Mexican states, Sonora and Yucatan, have 
tried prohibition, with some success, and Carranza's 
propaganda agents used the movement toward pro- 
hibition as a proof of his sincerity for social reform. 
But Diaz began the temperance movement, en- 
deavoring to substitute beer, and beer of an ex- 
cellent quality and comparatively low alcoholic 
strength, for 'pulque and for the more violent 
drinks which are used in those sections of the coun- 
try where pulque could not be procured. As it was, 
a great deal was done in the middle classes. In fact, 
advocates of beer as a "temperance drink" could 
have found extremely interesting material in 
Mexico on the function which beer performed in 
aiding the establishment of a new middle class, 
for the use of beer working down from above 
undoubtedly tended to displace first mezcal and 
then pulque in the liquid diet of the regenerated 
workman. 

While it was enforced, prohibition in Yucatan 
was fairly successful, although there was never any 
great difficulty in securing liquor if the price was 
forthcoming. In Sonora many reports were made 
on the reduction of crime following prohibition, the 
number of recorded arrests having dropped from 
200-300 down to 30-35 per month in Hermosillo. 
Some difficulty in enforcement was, of course, ex- 
perienced, and the price of liquor increased many 
fold, the quotation for a twenty-five-centavo quart 
of mezcal reaching three pesos, effectively quashing 
the tippling of the proletariat. Carranza was a 
stanch adherent of prohibition and when in the rev- 

379 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

olutionary field he enforced prohibition as a measure 
of pacification — and punishment. 

The extent of sexual overindulgence in any group 
is calculable through knowledge of the people and 
also through the secondarily important feature of 
the extent of prostitution. The Mexican's exceed- 
ing frankness in discussing sexual matters allows a 
very fair estimate from knowledge of the people. 
Primarily is the evidence of the attitude of the men 
toward the women, and, indeed, vice versa. The 
Mexican, of whatever class, never trusts his wife, 
or his friends with his wife, for the primacy of sex 
in the relationship between men and women he 
takes for granted, and, indeed, quite freely admits 
it as the reason for his seclusion of his wife from 
other men. The attitude of virtually all Mexicans 
toward women is expressed in the way they appraise 
their beauty and in the comments which one and all 
make on the women whom they pass on the street or 
see in houses, theaters, and ballrooms. The accept- 
ance of this attitude by Mexican women is shown 
not only in the archness of their flirtation (which 
is seldom, if ever, "harmless" in the sense that 
the flirtation of an American or English girl may be 
almost without sexual significance), but in the care 
with which girls are watched over by their knowing 
mothers and in the mere fact that not even engaged 
couples are left unchaperoned. 

Among the men and women of the lower classes, 
the sexual instinct is comparable only to that of 
animals, and is as frankly and openly yielded to. 
In the upper planes of society, the whole affair takes 

380 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

hold of the national imagination and virtually 
monopolizes it, and the intellectual processes of 
most Mexicans, in their early years at least, are 
confined largely to the creation of fantastic erotic 
interests. Both the position of Mexican wives as 
virtual sexual slaves, and the maintenance of mis- 
tresses, are, in the first case, the result of the Mexi- 
can male's refusal to limit any impulse, and, in the 
second, of his search for the intellectual stimulus of 
variety and naughtiness. 

The Mexican woman is not without her willing 
contribution to this devouring passion, and with the 
aid of the probably stimulating tropical climate has 
had her part not only m her own early wasting away, 
but also in the terrific drain on masculine vitality 
which has followed. 

American life insm-ance experts in Mexico have 
frankly stated that probably the greatest element 
working against the'' expectation of hfe " of Mexican 
apphcants for insurance has been their willingness to 
waste their vital energies in sexual overindulgence. 

To go no farther into the subject (which is not, 
however, to be discounted because it discourages 
enlargement), there are statistical phases which bear 
out the theory. Statistics on prostitution are not pub- 
lished in Mexico, but Judge Julio Guerrero, quoted 
previously, has set down his own conclusions on 
the basis of the figures available to him, as follows:'' 

In one typical year there were registered in the health records 
699 new professional prostitutes (of whom 33 were forced to 

1 Op. cit., p. 351. 

381 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

register according to regulations of the health department) and 
there were discovered 2,809 clandestine ones. In this number 
are not included those who were discovered for the first time 
and warned against a repetition of the infringement of the 
law; of these there were about 1,000. 

So, in one year there were 3,508 new prostitutes in the City 
of Mexico, or 1 per cent of the population. In order that 
these women live there must be a clientele of at least two per 
day, which means 7,016 youths who daily seek pleasure. And 
this does not represent the total, but merely the daily average. 
Multiply this by 365; 2,560,840 then would be more nearly 
the figure. Now divide this by weeks in one year, and we 
have a total of 49,232 persons who lead this sort of life weekly. 
The annual profits from this trade are at the least P5,000,000. 

In approaching the subject of crime as such, it 
seems best to eliminate a discussion of all that may 
be called ''poHtical," although in that category are 
to be included thousands of examples of human 
passion and greed which are distinctly the result of 
the loosening of social control and are in no sense 
poHtical or miUtary. All of this, however, the 
Mexican blandly dismisses as ^Hhe fortunes of war." 

Allowing, then, for all the vast loss of life, the 
mnum>er'able outrages on women and children, the 
destruction of millions of pesos' worth of foreign and 
native property — not confined alone to the past 
decade — on the score of ''political crime," there 
remain the two divisions of individual crime, those 
against property and those against persons. 

Normally, the crimes against property are chiefly 
of a minor order. In olden days banditry was 
common, and during the revolutions it has again 
become a recognized profession, either under revo- 

382 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

lutionary banners or under none. When Mexico 
has had well-ordered government, however, there 
has been little housebreaking, there are few holdups, 
and almost all thievery is in the form of pilfering 
and pocket picking. 

The Mexican seems to be honest in larger matters 
where he is convinced that it is worth while for him 
to be so; but in small affairs this code of honor com- 
pletely disappears. The long apprenticeship in 
slavery and servility, the vast differences which at 
one time existed between those who had anything 
at all and those who had nothing have, of course, 
warped that sense of values, and to-day the Mexican 
conception of property is a thing so essentially per- 
sonal and individual that the sympathetic student 
finds himself badly tangled when he endeavors to 
place definite limitations upon what belongs to one 
man and what to another in the Mexican mind. 

Thievery is a recognized institution, and petty 
pilfering is almost universal among servants. 
Thus those who have lost anything usually demand 
of their servants first the return of the property, and, 
when the theft is vigorously denied, suddenly call 
for the pawn tickets for the goods, a ruse which is 
ludicrously successful in nine cases out of ten. The 
practice of the clerks who stole a sum about equal 
to. their wages is significant of this same attitude 
in the higher classes, and the storekeeper who did 
not raise the wages of these clerks because they 
would only steal more was a student of Mexican 
psychology. 

During the viceregal days theft was punishable 

25 383 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

by death even when the amount stolen was very 
small, and under Diaz service in the army was the 
prompt fate of pickpockets and other petty thieves. 
Severe penalties for housebreaking made this crime 
uncommon at least in times of peace, though this is 
surprising when one considers the ease with which 
thefts of this sort could be accomplished, owing to 
the fiat roofs and the open patios of the houses. 
Housebreaking was not entirely unknown during 
the Diaz period, but as a custom it was not recog- 
nized among the thieving fraternity. This may be 
attributed to lack of personal courage, but it prob- 
ably goes back to that fixed attitude of the Mexican 
toward life in general which prevents him from 
doing anything the possible results of which do not 
seem worth the risk. Under the revolutionary 
regune housebreaking flourished under the guise of 
mihtary search. Those who lived through the 
various occupations of Mexico City and other 
towns discuss feelingly the difficulties which they 
faced in opposing the legal '^searching" of their 
estabUshments. Among the soldiers the stealing of 
automobiles was common, the usual occasion being 
the retreat of one army or another, when rapid 
transport was in great demand. In the days of 
Diaz automobile thefts were uncommon, but the 
I08B of bicycles and any other small pieces of 
property was almost inevitable if they were left 
long unattended. 

The pilfering which is common in Mexico may 
be due to a heritage from the communal life of the 
early Indians when all property was held in common, 

384 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

but in a nation where political crime is rife, and 
where anything can be done by the powerful under 
full protection of law, one can hardly expect petty 
thievery to be eradicated without some decided 
reform of the methods of thought as well as the 
methods of administration. 

Outside of the field of political crime there is com- 
paratively little wanton destruction of property. 
However, the wooden and steel shutters which 
covered the windows of all shops at night, even in 
the time of Diaz, indicate that in boisterous mood 
the peon enjoys nothing more than a bit of playful 
destruction — though usually with the idea of steal- 
ing what might be exposed. Not even the seques- 
tration of important parts of machinery, which is 
common in Mexico, can be ascribed to destructive- 
ness. The few centavos which the peon can get 
for a bit of brass bearing which is vital to a delicate 
machine, or the saving to himself by the sandals he 
cuts out of a great transmission belt, is quite suffi- 
cient to induce him to destroy the efficiency of 
either piece of property. The theft is all that 
comes to his mind, and in an analysis of motives 
thievery can be considered almost the only form, 
or at least the basic form, of all crimes against 
property. 

Crimes against persons are classified as follows: 
Threats, attacks on the poUce, duels, homicides, 
infanticides, injurias, or shght hurts, golpes, or blows 
in which no blood is drawn (simple assault), and 
lesiones, or blows in which blood flows (assault with 

intent). There is a great difference in the serious- 

385 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

ness of the latter two offenses. Where blood is 
drawn, whether by pistol, knife, or the fists, the law 
of Mexico regards the offense potentially as equally 
serious, a correlation of the English mahem, or dis- 
figurement, which is often interpreted with ridicu- 
lous hair splitting by Mexican judges. The result 
seems to be that the Mexican uses a knife or a 
pistol as freely as Americans or Englishmen would 
use their fists. The only escape from the danger 
of being accused of making a lesion is to do battle 
with the pedal extremities. 

Drunkenness is not placed in the official lists of 
crimes in Mexico, although under the viceroys it 
was subject to severe punishment. During the 
time of Diaz it was taken as an index of guilt rather 
than a crime itself. This rule, as applied to the 
brawls which followed most fiestas, gave the police 
the reputation of being more interested in the 
amount of liquor consumed than in the crime itself, 
an attitude not entirely unjustified on their part, 
for a Mexican's bravado as well as his dangerous- 
ness is often in proportion to the amount of liquor 
he has assimilated. 

Criminal statistics for Mexico are hopelessly in- 
complete and inadequate. Only in the Federal 
District have they ever been of record in any form 
which makes comparison possible between different 
years. In the following table, prepared from data 
obtained from unpublished records of the office of 
the prosecuting attorney, the year 1897 is given as 
an index of earlier data, and that from 1906 down 
year by year. This is for the Federal District 

386 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

alone, a section with a population varying from 
540,000 in 1900 to 720,000 in 1910. The classifica- 
tion of golpes is translated ''simple assault" and the 
more serious lesiones as ''assault with intent," 
although not all lesiones are so serious, and should 
not be confused with the more exact definition of the 
English law's "assault with intent to kill." 



Against Persons: 

Simple assault 

Assault with intent. 

Homicide 

Infanticide 

Against Property: . . . . 

Robbery 

Abuse of trust 

Swindling 

Fraud and forgery . . 
Attacks on Police .... 

Men 

Women 

Total Convictions .... 



1897 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 



51 

5,830 

102 



1,230 

190 

26 

12 

199 



8,106 



152 
8,563 

139 

2 

3,530 

2,680 

739 

111 

"273 
10,117 

3,047 
13,164 



222 

9,588 

127 

1 

4,445 

3,509 

815 

62 

39 

269 

11,387 

3,805 

15,192 



187 

9,636 

145 

1 

5,318 

4,085 

1,052 

72 

"3i4 
12,473 

3,537 
16,010 



258 

10,423 

239 

5,545 

3,263 

1,063 

93 

"388 
12,428 

3,890 
16,318 



163 

8,886 
148 

4,884 
3,503 
1,339 



383 

11,494 

3,435 

14,929 



6,731 
106 



2,598 

872 

69 

"sio 

8,904 

2,364 

11.268 



The Diaz government collapsed in May, 1911, but 
the rule of Francisco de la Barra, lasting until the 
election of Madero in the fall of 1911, continued the 
Diaz regime virtually intact, although the falling 
off in the number of convictions in 1911 does show 
the loosening of the hand of the old system. 

After 1911, however, the statistics of crime are 
more an index of the growing depravity of the 
police and court systems than as showing any such 
decrease in crime as the figures seem to indicate. 
In 1913, under Huerta, there were no records from 
January to June, and with this year also begins a 
notation which appears throughout the five years 
that follow, "the criminal escaped from prison," 

387 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

meaning that he was taken out (if he was not 
originally arrested for the purpose) to be put in the 
army which happened to be in control of Mexico 
City at the time. The year 1914 was one of military 
occupations, and in 1915 the courts were closed and 
no records kept. In 1916 the courts were being re- 
organized, and in this year and in 1917 and 1918 the 
usual Mexican habit of making all statistics appear 
for the credit of the government developed the 
"notable reduction in criminality in the capital" 
which was reported by the Carranza propagandists. 
The figures for these later years are as follows : 





1912 


1913 


1914 


1915 


1916 


1917 


1918 


Against Persons: 

Simple assault 

Assault with intent 

Homiride 


5,330 
157 

2,694 

2,025 

608 

61 

' 303 
7,203 
1,836 
9,039 


"5 
o 

1 
a 

a 
-a 

w 

2,636 

847 

3,483 


a 
_o 

"S 

a 

o 
O 

>l 

m 

1 

2,448 

720 

3,168 


CO 

O 

i 

3 
o 
O 


444 

1,900 

45 

' 328 

i,862 
219 

' ■ 18 
23 
3,540 
1,593 
5,133 


223 
2,506 

71 

' 215 

1,332 
140 

■"4 

25 


3,482 


Infanticide 










1,903 


Robbery 










Fraud and forgery 


140 


Men 




Women 




Total Convictions 


5,510 



Although the difference in laws, procedure, and 
classification make exact comparisons between 
Mexico City (which comprises, in population, most 
of the Federal District whose crimes are listed 
above) and other cities impossible, it will be il- 
luminating to make a rough table of Mexico and 
cities of about the same size in the United States. 
The year 1910 is taken. 

388 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 



Mexico 1 



San 
Francisco 



Detroit 



Buffalo 



Pittsburgh 



Airests 

Criminal assaults. . 
(Assault and battery) 

Homicides 

Against property. . . 



148 

4,844 



32,914 

1,139 

94 

1,118 



17,875 

908 

17 

1,187 



22,203 

919 

21 

1,725 



39,151 



107 
6 



On the whole, Mexico under Diaz was a well- 
pohced city, for Mexican justice was quick and fairly 
sure, and the police and penal systems were rela- 
tively efficient in the Federal District, Almost the 
only difficulty experienced under Diaz in the preser- 
vation of order was the failure or refusal of the 
public to make complaints, a condition due not 
alone to a feeling of class loyalty, but more often 
to the complications resulting from the persistence 
of the Spanish code. This was as likely to lock up 
a witness as the criminal himself, for both were 
considered equally important for the purposes of 
justice. Aside from the legal code, the provisions 
against crime took on chiefly the nature of the 
control of the sale of alcohol and the vagrancy laws. 
As noted above, complete prohibition of the sale of 
liquor has been tried in two Mexican states, with 
reported success in the repression of crime. The 
control of the liquor traffic under Diaz was largely 
confined to the regulation of the hours in which it 
was sold, and attempts to enforce the law regarding 
its sale to intoxicated persons. 



^ Number of arrests is not available. In 1912, 26,471 persons 
were tried for various offenses, 9,039 being convicted. The 
convictions for 1910 were 14,929, so that by the same proportion 
about 39,000 were tried. Arrests were doubtless much higher. 

389 



• THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

The vagrancy laws of Mexico have comparatively 
little enforcement even to-day, for industry covers 
a multitude of occupations, so that in a debate 
with a policeman, even if not before a judge, a peon 
can call himself employed at honest labor when he 
is selling bird seed at one centavo a thimbleful 
from a stock which he can hold in one hand. Va- 
grancy laws are used, as elsewhere, to simplify the 
arrest of drunken peons who have no means of 
support and are too intoxicated to invent one. 

The penal system in Mexico is largely of Spanish 
and French origin. Imprisonment is the usual 
punishment, for fines mean only imprisonment to 
the indigent peons. In the early days the jails were 
usually churches, monasteries, or colonial fortresses, 
and many ghastly crimes were committed in the 
name of justice. During the time of Diaz, however, 
education and labor were introduced into the 
prisons and there was a rapid elimination of some 
of the abuses which had heretofore been common. 
But much that was unworthy remained. The old 
prisons, such as Belem in Mexico City (now des- 
troyed) and San Juan de Uloa at Vera Cruz, were 
famous as much for their unhappy surroundings 
and unhealthful environment as for their success in 
spreading crime through the nation. The hundreds 
of prisoners (the daily average at Belem was 4,000) 
were confined in common rooms practically without 
any accommodations, and vermin and vile conversa- 
tion filled them day and night. The result was the 
transmission of disease and the inevitable de- 
moralization of young offenders by the hardened 

390 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

criminals who were the habitues of the place. 
Prison conditions are most deplorable in Mexico, 
and the improvement even under Diaz was very 
slow. Conditions like those at Belem were common 
in all city prisons throughout the repubhc, and 
uncounted harm has undoubtedly been done by the 
persistence of this type of jail. 

The modem penitentiary at Mexico City (capa- 
city 700) is, however, equipped with workshops, 
baths, and hospital; each room is provided with 
sanitary conveniences and running water, and Hght 
penetrates all the cells. The food is scientific and 
ample, and the entire system is so complete that the 
architecture of the building and much of the ad- 
ministration have been copied in other countries. 
Some of the states also have penitentiaries ap- 
proaching modem standards. 

Prison labor has been common in Mexico since 
the colonial period, and during the time of Diaz 
criminals did considerable work on the roads under 
guard, and factories within the prison walls turned 
out goods of value to the community, although in 
many places the energy of the prisoners was still 
devoted only to making worthless knickknacks to 
be sold to visitors. Some reform schools have been 
estabUshed, the Correctional School for Boys in 
Mexico City housing 400, that for girls 200. 

There is a death penalty for murder in most 

Mexican states, but previous to the revolution, 

Campeche, Yucatan, Puebla, and Nuevo Leon had 

abolished it. In the Federal District in 1906 there 

were 139 convictions for murder, but only in 17 

391 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

cases was the death penalty ordered, and in only 
2 was it carried out. Executions in Mexico are by 
shooting and are held privately, as a rule, in the 
prison yard. 

Deportation for crime was a common method of 
punishment during the Spanish days, and Diaz 
continued this, the "administrative" handling of 
some criminal cases being a recognized part of the 
Mexican penal system of the time. Some criminals 
were fined or sentenced to imprisonment and were 
then "allowed" to work out their punishment on the 
hot-country plantations. The Yaqui deportations 
from Sonora to Yucatan were not supposedly in the 
form of expiation of crimes, but were excused on 
the ground of "military necessity." Pickpockets 
were usually sent to the army, this punishment 
being effected by administrative order and not by 
court sentence, and justice of this sort was quick 
and very sure. 

Ranking with the national vices and with crime, 
pauperism is one of the great sociological realities 
of Mexico. It is manifest in the fact that a vast 
portion of the population lives out its life in the 
direst poverty. It is visibly demonstrated in the 
thousands of beggars, in the starving children who 
to-day dot the country from the Rio Grande to 
Guatemala. It is the one problem which cannot be 
hidden and which no statistics of national pros- 
perity will cover. Its causes are many, beginning 
with the climate, which gives neither stimulus to 
energy nor easy living, while yet tempting the na- 
tive always with the promise of comfort and the 

392 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

invitation to dreamy laziness. The racial mixture 
has no tendency to raise the Mexican above the 
poverty line, and his inherited disease, his unfor- 
tunate diet, and the vices which mark his habits of 
life, all drag him do^vn. IlUteracy reduces his pos- 
sibilities for advancement, and the political con- 
ditions which he pulls down about his ears at 
inevitable intervals throughout his history destroy 
all that long industry and the rare ambition of his 
aristocrats have built for him. 

The outward index of the pauperism which this 
induces is the beggary which marks aU Mexico. 
Beggars swarm, blind and halt and sick, all filthy, 
some licensed and filling the streets each day, the 
majority unlicensed and thus pouring out only on 
the Saturdays and feast days when the laws are 
relaxed. The chief charities of Mexico are not 
hospitals and fonnal poor farms, but private bread 
lines and private asylums for the wretchedly poor, 
and the Church has devoted its funds, sometimes 
great and sometimes small, to the care, chiefly, of 
the poor — and the poor in Mexico means the 
paupers, the miserable, filthy, half-human waifs of 
every age who have been left behind in even the 
relatively mild race for sustenance in Mexico. 

In the matter of pauperism, however, statistics 

fail us again. The occupational census of 1910 

showed ninety-six professional beggars in all Mexico. 

The total number of defectives reported in 1910 was 

31,245,^ and there are no adequate figures covering 

the number of persons in institutions, owing once 

iSeep. 106 

393 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

more to the ancient quarrel between Church and 
state which makes it necessary for the Church to 
conceal its charities as well as its school attendance. 

There has, however, been not a little government 
charity. The taxes on the lotteries in the time of 
Diaz were devoted to the funds for the poor, the 
Federal government's budget for charitable insti- 
tutions and succor being slightly over PI, 000,000 
annually, the number of persons receiving help, ei- 
ther as inmates or as temporary patients, averaging 
4,000 a day. Practically all of the Federal govern- 
ment's charity was expended in the Federal District 
and thus chiefly for the poor and indigent of Mexico 
City. The following are the chief government 
charitable institutions, all in or about the capital: 

General Hospital, opened in 1905; capacity, 1,000; 
average number of patients, 686. Juarez Hospital, 
for prisoners and typhus patients; average number 
of patients, 684. Morelos Hospital, founded in 
1582, now devoted to the care of fallen women; 
average number of patients, 349. San Hipolito 
Lunatic Asylum for men, founded in 1567; average 
number of patients, 151. Lunatic Asylum for 
Women, founded in 1698; average number of pa- 
tients, 388. Public Dispensary; average consul- 
tations, 225 daily. Hospital for Epileptics, at 
Texcoco ; average number of patients, 60. 

Children's Home {Hospicio de Ninos), founded in 
1763, its modem building being one of the show 
places of the capital; capacity, 1,000, boys being 
double the number of girls, as the boys are dis- 
missed at the age of sixteen, the girls being kept 

394 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

until they are thirty-one unless outside opportuni- 
ties are offered them. Foundling's Hospital, 
founded in 1767; average number of infants, 134. 

National School for the Deaf and Dumb, founded 
in 1866; average niunber of students, 66. National 
School for the Blind, founded in 1870; average 
number of students, 76. 

Most of the older institutions listed were origi- 
nally founded by the Church, but were taken over 
by the government under the Laws of Reform. In 
1899 a law authorizing private charities was en- 
acted, making their operation completely legal and 
making the government the patron of all institu- 
tions thus officially recognized. The following are 
the chief of these: 

Monte de Piedad, known as the national pawn- 
shop, although founded in 1775 by the Conde de 
Regla. In the time of Diaz the new pledges aver- 
aged P500,000 monthly. 

Hospital of Jesus of Nazareth, founded by 
Hernando Cortez, 1524, and still supported from 
his estates; for contagious diseases. Concepci6n 
Beistegui Hospital, for sufferers from chronic 
diseases; average number of patients, 100. Oph- 
thalmic Hospital of Our Lady of Light, free to 
sufferers from eye troubles. 

Casa Amiga de la Obrera, a day nursery founded 
in 1887 by the wife of President Diaz, for the care 
of children of workingwomen; average attendance, 
300. Private Home for Beggars; the aged receive 
a home, the younger are taught trades; founded in 
1879, since which date 5,000 have received its care, 

395 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

there being, in February, 1908, 180 old people, 91 
boys, and 73 girls. Home for Regeneration of In- 
fancy, a rescue home for fallen women, where trades 
are taught. 

There are a number of other private charities, of 
many sorts, including the three important Ameri- 
can, British, and French hospitals, perhaps the most 
modern and efficient in the country. The Spanish 
and German hospitals, though without the modern 
hospital buildings of the American, British, and 
French institutions, are well managed and far above 
the usual private Mexican hospital. The Church 
hospitals and charitable institutions were fairly 
mmierous in the time of Diaz, but all were of a 
relatively small capacity. 

Since the recent revolutions, many of the char- 
itable institutions here Hsted have been emptied 
and the buildings used for barracks, the unfortunate 
inmates adding their misery to the poverty and 
destruction of war. As always, this temporary up- 
setting of the slow structure of centuries is only 
noted — one must look on Mexico as having at least 
the potentiaUties of all that she once gained. 

Under Diaz some beginning was made in pro- 
viding pensions for aged and injured government 
employees, but this had not passed beyond the stage 
of special legislation or executive grants. Some of 
the foreign companies have begun pension systems 
of their own, and the Federal Constitution of 1917 
has elaborate provisions for the payment of damage 
claims by employers to workers injured or incapaci- 
tated in their service. As this is written the pro- 

396 



VICES, CRIME, AND PAUPERISM 

visions of the labor laws in this, as in most other 
phases, are being used chiefly as a means of extorting 
money from employers either for the corruption of 
government officials or in more open blackmail. 
Readjustment will doubtless come with the im- 
provement of the personnel of the courts and the 
law turned to its proper channel of protection of the 
honest worker. This should have a truly beneficent 
effect, as heretofore such indemnity as employers 
paid an injured worker was always spent on a 
fiesta or a series of fiestas, and did nothing to relieve 
the country of the support of the unfortunate. 
Much administration will have to be arranged for 
the handling of such benefits as should be given the 
workingmen, in order that these may relieve the 
state of the burden of pauperism. 

Life insurance made considerable headway under 
General Diaz, three of the large American companies 
having agencies in the country and one of them a 
great office building in Mexico City. There were 
also two large Mexican companies, established 
during the same period. The revolution caused 
the withdrawal of all the foreign companies before 
1916, and one of the Mexican concerns has recently 
closed out its business. Life insiu-ance was never a 
national habit, however, and its beneficiaries were 
confined almost exclusively to the upper classes, 
the smallest policy written by the American com- 
panies, for instance, being P4,000. The Mexican 
companies tried some of the popular forms of insur- 
ance, but created little business among the lower 

classes, and little industrial insurance was carried. 

397 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

With the sorry pages that record Mexico's crime 
and poverty, our survey of the Uving conditions of 
the Mexican people ends. The chasm of her faults 
is deeper and muddier than the paths of her normal 
life, and yet they seem but little different. Life is 
always close to its lowest ebb in Mexico, and what 
has been set down in this chapter is probably more 
intimately related to the normal conditions of the 
country than are such data in other lands. The 
faults and defects of Mexico are not swept behind 
administrative doors; they have always been 
everywhere in her life, for all who would to see. 
Figures are often made to lie, much omission seeks 
to cover serious faults, but always the misery and 
the poverty and the vice are inescapable facts. 
They belong to Mexico, to the lethargy of her past 
and to her present suffering, but they point clearly 
the ways which her regeneration must follow. 
Appalling they may be at first sight, but at least 
they are all before us, and before those strong, 
devoted Mexicans who are ready, in spite of them, 
to take up the thankless burden of the nation's 
regeneration. 



XII 

CONCLUSION 

THROUGH years of tumult and disaster, through 
years of peace and rebuilding, Mexico ever 
and forever mixes and restratifies again, oil and 
water and ether. The experiment has seemingly 
lasted long enough for the realization of this to be 
complete, yet she always seems trying again, always 
the same stirring, always the same restratification, 
but never through it all a recognition of the ultimate 
impossibility of the one ideal she clings to — racial 
amalgamation. As we look on at this physical and 
pohtical mingling of races, the hopelessness of a 
radical and immediate settlement eternally sends 
us wondering back to the questions of whether, had 
the Spaniards never come, Mexico might not be 
better off to-day, of whether, with greater immigra- 
tion, she might not have been a whiter and a better 
land, of whether, if we should leave her to herself, 
she might not be able to work out her own salvation. 
But the elements of the problem are the elements 
of the solution, in the forces which are to-day 
actually existent. We cannot speculate on a 
greater white immigration because it has never come 

26 399 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

and is at present climatically and economically im- 
practicable. Cm" other speculations are one and 
the same — Mexico, in her "working out" has been 
tending rapidly back toward that very Indianism. 
We cannot consider the wisdom of letting her go 
all the sinister way back to her ancient barbarism, 
because the great outstanding fact of the present is 
that Mexico belongs to the modem world, and the 
modern world has vital need of her. She cannot 
be allowed to slip back nor may she confine herself 
within jealous borders. No man can choose, for 
forces mightier than men have chosen, and history 
and industry have pushed Mexico to a place from 
which she can never retire. 

To face this truth is Mexico's problem. For the 
solution there is but one force within her people, 
the mighty element which has ever rescued her from 
her great failures — her own true aristocracy. The 
existence of this group is the one fact of substantial 
and reassuring importance in Mexico to-day. This 
element, the true social elite,^ the one vital power 
in all hiunan governments, has long existed in 
Mexico, surviving revolutions and disaster, re- 
building her after each of her social and political 
debauches. 

Mexico's true aristocracy traces its descent, as 



^ This true aristocracy rests upon deeper stratifications than 
caste rankings. From modern sociology we may take the names 
and character of Mexico's four "true social classes": (1) the 
true elite, those who help, inspire, and lead; (2) the nonsocial 
classes, marked by narrow individualism; (3) the pseudosocial 
classes of parasites and paupers; (4) the antisocial or criminal 
classes. — ^Cf. F. H. Giddings, Principles of Sociology. 

400 



CONCLUSION 

surely as does her aristocracy of caste or class, to 
the colonial Spaniards. Among the mass of schem- 
ing, struggling white men who were the pioneers of 
Mexico were many great teachers and many philan- 
thropists whose benefactions and foundations sur- 
vive to this day. In the laws of the Council of the 
Indies and in the rulings of the viceroys are records 
of a true attitude of altruistic protection of the 
Indians, edicts enforced so thoroughly that to this 
day the simple peasant of interior Mexico cannot 
conceive of a white man who is not his protector, 
or of a priest who is not a devoted missionary to 
his welfare. 

Deep and well built the Spaniards, and when, 
seventy years after the first revolution, Diaz made 
opportunity for the true elite to serve again, the 
great example of the viceroys was before them; 
under Diaz there was a truer expression of altruistic 
and conscientious government than Mexico had 
known since the viceroys or than she has seen since 
Diaz fell. 

The true upper class has never yet been the 
product of the so-called democracies which are 
forever drenching the country in blood. Indeed, 
the most sweeping and condemnatory criticism of 
the Mexican aristocracy (the true elite as well as 
the upper social class) is that it has not taken part, 
nor does it take part to-day, in the political activities 
of the country. This charge is true, and its 
f Eiilure to do so is primarily in the fact that Mexican 
poUtics is a politics of the rifle and the machete, so 
that the power in Mexico from the exile of the 

401 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

Spaniards almost continuously has been in the 
hands of the mestizo agitators. This condition has 
been compared by one of the Creole exiles to the 
situation in the southern United States following 
the Civil War, when the aristocrats were powerless 
under the domination of carpetbaggers with negro 
hordes at their back. This Mexican begs us to 
remember that 'Hhe carpetbaggers of Mexico have 
experience and traditions rooted as far back as 
colonial times. They have the shrewd and subtle 
wit of the Indian combined with the grandiose 
words of modern civilization, with which they have 
gained the sympathy of uninformed outsiders." ^ 

These ''carpetbaggers," the nonsocial leaders, 
have dominated Mexico from the fall of Diaz to 
this day. The Madero revolution, m its inception, 
was the upheaval of a group of intellectuals, and its 
primary object was the infusion of new blood into 
the aristocracy. But the idealism was short lived, 
for to attain his ends Madero had accepted the aid 
of the unsocial elements of all Mexico, and when he 
became president the carpetbaggers moved into the 
departments, into Congress, into the army, and as 
officials, deputies, and generals began their long de- 
bauch of blood and thievery. To-day, thanks to 
this element, the true elite is almost nonexistent 
within Mexico's borders. They have been driven 
out at the points of guns, and by their own pride 
and unwillingness to bow their heads or to prostitute 



^ T. Esquivel Obregon, "Factors in the Historical Evolution of 
Mexico," in HispaniC'American Historical Revieio, May, 1919, 
p. 171. 

403 



CONCLUSION 

their ideals to the dictatorship of the nonsocial 
elements. The narrow individualism of the new- 
rulers, their concentration upon the momentary 
fruits of victory, their sense of their own ineptitude 
and therefore of need for immediate and colossal 
pecuniary and social success, are dominating present 
Mexican history. 

We have seen much of them in the past, and we 
shall doubtless see even more of them for yet a httle 
while, in the future. No Mexican President has 
yet climbed to power save by being one of them or 
by using their methods. Although the day of Diaz 
has passed, the world still seems to cUng to the 
fond hope of the uprising from within this nonsocial 
class of such a man as Diaz was in his youth. 
Diaz indeed rose to his power by his manifestation 
of the '^iron hand," but those fail dismally in under- 
standing Mexico who beheve that Diaz maintained 
his hold by that means, for Diaz's hold upon Mexico 
was in his tolerance and in his conception of the 
obligations and duties of the world's true aristoc- 
racy. A newer day has yet to dawn, when tolerance 
shall not wait upon force, and the miracle of Diaz 
shall not be a nation's hope. 

While the '^ carpetbaggers" represent the non- 
social class in Mexico at its worst, the mass of the 
population, with its apathy, its selfishness, and its 
short-sightedness, makes up the great bulk of the 
nonsocial, narrowly individuaUstic group. In aU 
countries this is true, but in Mexico it seem griev- 
ously aggravated. The millions of Indians, the 
long-suffering, self-pitjdng (or grafting) middle 

403 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

class which accepts and supports each government 
as it rises and rushes to the next when it falls, offer 
a problem that none but the most devoted of 
aristocracies can even face. No election (save pos- 
sibly that of Madero) ever brought out 10,000 
voters, no Mexican long engages in revolution for 
an ideal, and no social reform was ever achieved 
save by the force of the aristocracy or the foresight 
of the foreigner. Truly, the mass of Mexico, non- 
social, inert, remains a problem even without the 
depressing example of the selfish horrors of the 
''carpetbaggers." 

Under Diaz, as under all previous Mexican 
governments, the pseudosocial class of parasites 
held an important place. In Mexico these are not 
merely paupers; they are parasites of government, 
the officeholders, the so-called ''bureaucrats," who 
have been the nation's scoiu^ge since the days when 
the illegitimate mestizo sons of Spanish officials 
crowded the anterooms of viceroys and bishops. 
Every revolution in Mexico, and increasingly each 
uprising of new chieftains, has added to this number 
by its destruction of the opportunities for honest 
livelihood, and by the destruction of that middle 
class of artisans, clerks, and storekeepers which 
peace has tended to create. 

Thus, too, the antisocial class has been swollen 
by each new destruction of the chance for simple 
hinnan existence. In the revolutions of the middle 
of the last century, peaceful peons learned the ease 
of the life of bandit and thief, so that one of the 
greatest problems which Diaz faced was the re- 

404 



CONCLUSION 

forming of the Mexican mind to conceptions of life 
other than Uving at the expense of the community. 
To-day again, one of the great problems of Mexico 
is the winning back of the people from ideas of Hfe 
by violence to conceptions of civilization which do 
not glorify robbery, murder, and rape as they are 
to-day glorified, under revolutionary rule, from the 
National palace to the peon's cornfield. 

In the chapters which fill these pages we have 
watched the unfolding of the life of Mexico as it 
has been built and broken, erected again, and 
again tumbled to the dust, by the interaction of 
these four kinds of Mexicans, separated from one an- 
other as are the four winds, yet converging together 
to the whirlwind which has been their history. We 
have seen their heredity and their environment, 
with race as the determining fact of the one, and 
climate the outstanding element of the other. The 
racial background is the two great elements of 
Indian and Spaniard, manifesting themselves in 
the making of the mestizo, in the determining of the 
population, in the health which makes their attitude 
toward Hfe and civilization, in the caste system 
which so im.erringly records what they tliinl^: of 
themselves. Four great conditions of environment 
we have seen: climate, the community, rehgion, and 
education. We have looked at the social matrix of 
the family, its homes, its food, its clothing, and its 
cleanliness. We have measured the economic en- 
vironment of labor, of income, and the cost of 
living. We have plumbed the unsocial manifesta- 
tions, vices, crime, and pauperism. 

405 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

For heredity and environment are the making of 
life, and never did a people have a more definite 
heredity, and never a more clearly chiseled environ- 
ment. He ventures far who dares guess which is 
the more important, but he fails miserably who, in 
Mexico, at least, would underestimate the mighty 
influence of race as reflected in a national life which 
responds like a chemist's balance to each drop of 
blood, white or red. 

The race phase has the most definite relationship 
to the world without. In the days of the white 
Mexicans, under Spain and under Diaz, the land 
was developed and made great by help from out- 
side herself; she was part of the white man's world. 
In colonial days the Spaniard built her solid 
civiUzation, and under Diaz the foreigner was wel- 
comed and made, by his own success, a part of the 
success of Mexico. Before Diaz, and since his fall 
on down to to-day, the mestizo and Indian have 
ruled. In these times there has been manifested a 
bitter antiforeignism that is distinctly racial. No 
Mexican now speaks as did those of Diaz of a wel- 
come to foreigners, of a willingness to let them help 
in carrying the white man's burden in Mexico. 
To-day that attitude is dead — we need seek no 
apologies or explanations. Always the mestizo, 
jealous, conscious of an inferiority, has opposed 
white immigration and white development. He 
called the Diaz efforts to bring white colonists 
'^ manifestations of consanguinity," wrecked the 
Italian colonies through bureaucratic machinations, 
and finally wiped out the great Mormon settlements 

406 



CONCLUSION 

in Chihuahua by giving them to Indian armies for 
loot. The mixed bloods and the Indians want no 
aid of the white world — Mexican or foreign — in 
working out their problems. 

But Mexico Hves in the world of to-day. Her 
resoiu-ces, her gold and silver and oil, her henequen 
and rubber and coffee and lumber, her great labor 
supplies that wait so surely upon education and 
uplift, are forces which the white world cannot ig- 
nore — save to tm-n them over to the yellow. Mexico 
cannot live in isolation, for her lands Ue in the very 
heart of the world and her raw materials are sorely 
needed on all the seven seas. Diaz recognized this, 
as did and do the great men who were around him, 
and upon it they built a nobler patriotism than 
Mexico had ever known, a patriotism that saw 
Mexico in its place among the nations, not as a 
separate, isolated, ingrowing people eking out an 
existence amid barren hills whose wealth they have 
not the energy or capital to uncover. The true, 
broad patriotism of Mexico will draw the power of 
the world to its development, resolute, unafraid, 
conscious of its people's possibiUties and of her 
power to unfold them. 

In these days of radicahsm and internationalism, 
the word patriotism is likely to have an unwelcome 
sound, but the idea of patriotism is as mighty as it 
has always been. Upon its foundations have been 
built all of the Mexico that was permanent; upon 
it must be built all the Mexico that is to be. Mex- 
ico's last page has not been written, nor will it 

be while there are ideas that can revivify it, 

407 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 

institutions that can rebuild it, and men who can 
lead it. 

In the mass, the Mexican crowd rejects ideas, 
even though its individuals cling to them and weigh 
even their supremest moments in the scales of 
mind; ideas, then, must become the fabric of the 
patriotism of the crowd — ideas of service and of co- 
operation, ideas of education. In the mass, the 
Mexican crowd gazes in dull apathy at institutions 
and knows not what they are, and yet because the 
Mexican crowd is what it is, because the Mexican 
individual is what he is, institutions are a greater 
need to Mexico than to any other people in the 
world; institutions, then, must be given her — insti- 
tutions of honest government, of learning, of man- 
ual education, of uplift and clean joy. In the mass, 
the Mexican crowd follows a leader, and in the 
individual the Mexican loves a master who knows 
and understands him. A leader, a master, then! 
An aristocracy of those who understand and love 
and serve as well; an aristocracy fed deep with 
ideas, giving them out, growing with them and with 
its people; an aristocracy with institutions, a 
great, free institution of honest, devoted govern- 
ment, institutions of learning where true leaders, 
ever renewing themselves, may be brought up, 
schools where hand and heart shall be trained 
together, where peon and aristocrat may meet, and 
understand each other, always. 

Is it too much to ask? Too much to hope? 
Well, it may be, but this we know: that never since 
the earliest days of pre-Spanish history has Mexico 

408 



CONCLUSION 

failed to be strong and great when her leaders or 
her institutions or their ideas were great and strong. 
And we know that never in all that history has 
Indianism, allowed to tread the measures of 
unwonted cultures, been aught save the clown, the 
buffoon, the tragic victim of its own incompetence. 
It seems, indeed, that the step upon which Mexico 
and the w^orld make pause is clear. We know that 
the great Mexicans who alone must take up the 
burden of their country's regeneration wait, silent 
and uncomplaining, as they have waited these ten 
years, for the word of understanding and support 
which can come only from those in whose hands 
rests the scepter of the white man's world, that 
world to which they, as we, pay deep allegiance. 



INDEX 



Acapiilco, port of Galleons, 64; 
road to, 163. 

Adobe, 241. 

Adornment, 119. 

Agares, used to make liquor, 376. 

Agricola, Segunda Seinana, re- 
port quoted, 350. 

Agriculture, producer of wealth, 
131. 
See also Corn; Crops. 

Aguardiente, 376. 

Alcohol, climate and, 105. 

Indian deaths blamed on, 

59. 

See also Drinking; Liquor. 

Alimony, 223. 

Almuerzo, 259. 

Altitude, effect on nervous types, 
139. 

importance of, 134. 

Alvarado, Pedro de, 244. 

Amalgamation, racial . See Race . 

American Constitution, imi- 
tated, 158. 

Red Cross, in Vera Cruz, 

311; sends coin, 150. 

Americans, castes of, 124. 

census, 70. 

colonies of, 71. 

dairy farms, 275. 

farmers, 39. 

insurance companies, 397. 



modern housing, 256. 

railway builders, 84. 

railway employees, 122. 

train natives, 115. 

wages of, 356. 

Anahuae. See Valley of Mexico. 
Anglo-Saxon Constitution, 11. 
Animals, blessing of, 179. 
Anttforeignism, 6, 16, 26, 50. 

See also Foreigners; In- 

dianism. 
Antisocial class, 404. 
Apache Indians, 19. 
Apathy, effect on health, 97. 

■ of farmer, 148. 

toward work, 350. 

Aqueducts, 309. 

Arable land, proportion of, 132. 

Architecture, Aztec, 243. 

Spanish, 244. 

under Diaz, 245. 

Area of Mexico, 56. 
Argentine, immigration to, 70. 
Aristocracy, caste of, 126. 

destroyed, 127. 

Indian. See Indian. 

true, 400, 403, 409. 

white, 9, 10, 14. 

See also Whites. 
Army, needed for peace, 165. 
Asia, mythical source of Indians, 

20." 



411 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Asturians, 28. 
Asylums, 394-396. 
Atheists, 177. 

Atlantis, mythical source of In- 
dians, 19. 
Authority, respect for, 168. 
Autocolonization, 83. 
Automobiles, bad roads, 164. 
Aztecs, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. 

architecture, 243. 

civilization of, 32. 

— dress of, 290. 

gods still worshiped, 179. 

lack of roads, 162. 

no classes, 112. 

■ population of, 58. 

village organization, 155. 

Banana, 368. 

Bancroft, H. H., quoted, 22, 63. 

Banditry, 404. 

Banks, 352. 

merchants as, 358. 

Baptism, 171. 

Barter, 155. 

Basques, 28. 

Bathhouses, 304, 305. 

Bathrooms, 247, 304. 

Baths, cost of, 366. 

on St. John's Day, 118, 

301, 303. 
Beans, 261. 
Bedbugs, 306. 
Beds, 249-250. 
Beef, as food, 276. 

tapeworm in, 103. 

Beer, 379. 

Beggars, 341, 392. 

Belem prison, 390. 

Berbers, mythical ancestors of Capital, sources of, 351 

Indians, 19. punishment, 391. 

Birth and death rates, ratios of, Cargadors, 96. 

87. Carpetbaggers, 402. 

412 



comparative, 88. 

Birth control, absence of, 97. 

Birth rate, 86, 97. 

Births. See Children. 

Blanket. See Zerape. 

Blond race crossings, 42. 

Blue eyes, absence of, 42. 

Bolshevism, 11. 

Boys, place of, 229. 

Breakfast, 258. 

Bribery, labor problem and, 

326. 
Brick buildings, 242, 
Brides, age of, 218. 
British, caste of, 124. 

census of, 70. 

characteristics in mestizos, 

42. 
modern housing, 256. 

See also English. 
Brown, E. N., quoted, 331. 
Budget, personal, 361. 
Buildings, Aztec, 243. 

materials, 241. 

permanence of, 243. 

See also Architecture. 
Bulnes, Francisco, quoted, 51, 

145, 148. 
Bureaucrats, 114, 404. 

casts of, 123. 

Burial methods, 311. 
Butter, 267, 269. 
Buzzards, 309. 

Caciques, 35, 153. 
Caciquism, 54. 
"Calicoes," 124. 
California, settled from Mexico, 
64. 



INDEX 



Carranza, Venustiano, 16, 33, 
45, 48, 49, 50, 66, 100, 155, 
160, 165, 214, 373, 379, 388. 
See also Revolution of 1910- 
1920. 

Casa, 210. 

Casus de Vecindad, 120, 253. 

Casas Grandes, Mormons at, 
71. 

Castes, 48. 

created by land, 112. 

— list of. 111. 

"Castes and Classes," Part I, 
Chap. VI, 110. 



Utilitarian Catholics, 178, 

180. 
wealth of, 183. 

See also Religion; Reform, 

laws of. 
Catholic Directory, quoted, 172- 

174. 
Catholics, in United States, 175. 
Cellars, absence of, 242. 
Cement, first used, 244. 
Cemeteries, 312. 
Cena, 259. 
Census, 56-61. 

methods of, 57, 61. 

tables of, 60. 



Castizos, 111. 

Catholic Church, animals, bless- Charities, 393-396. 

ing of, 179. Charles IV, 184. 

baptisms, 57, 171. Charles V, 29. 

beautified Mexico, 182. Charro costume, 286, 287, 292. 

caste of lower clergy, 122. Chavacanes, 265. 

— church buildings, 173, 174. Chiapas, cultural center, 21. 



churches sacked, 186. 

clergy, caste of, 122. 

conversion of Indians, 29. 

• land owned by, 113. 

marriage and, 187, 213. 

missions, 7. 

— — nationalization of, 185, 186. 

Pagan CathoUcs, 178-180. 

Pious fund, 184, 185. 

poUtics and, 183-189. 

— — priesthood, 188. 

property nationalized, 185, 

186. 
— — Protestants and, 193. 
recovery from revolutions, 

187. 

• revenues of, 183, 185. 

• savior of Indians, 25. 

schools of, 116, 172-174. 

seminaries, 174, 188. 

Spain and, 183. 

Statistics, 172-175. 



413 



Chichimecs, 19, 21, 23, 24. 
Chihuahua, arable land in, 145. 
Children, adoption of, 224. 

average to family, 215. 

diet of, 284. 

dress of, 299. 

place in home, 229. 

population of, 91, 230. 

labor of, 342. 

legitimacy, 43, 87, 224, 228. 

Chiles, use in food, 257, 265-267, 

281. 
Chinese, census of, 70. 
Chocolate, use of, 271. 
Churches, numbers, 173, 174, 

175. 

See also Catholic Church; 

Protestants; Religion. 
Cities, centers of safety, 83. 
— — compared with U. S., 80. 

' distribution of, 80. 

number of, 79. 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Citizens, naturalized, 16, 70. 
Civics, education in, 168, 195. 
Clark, Victor S., quoted, 67, 282. 
"Classes, Castes and," Part I, 

Chap. VI, 110. 

color distinctions in, 116. 

divisions, 117-127. 

dress of, 117. 

See also Creoles; Mestizos; 

Middle class; Upper class. 
"Cleanliness and Sanitation," 

Part II, Chap. IX, 301. 
Cleanliness, cost of, 366. 

household, 248, 306. 

middle class, 304. 

Clergy, lower, caste of, 122. 

See also Catholic Church; 

Priests; Protestants; Re- 
ligion. 
Clerks, caste of, 122. 

salaries of, 354, 357. 

"Climate," Part II, Chap. I, 

131. 
Climate, alcohol and, 105. 

causes of, 139. 

contrasts of, 140. 

effect on diet, 258, 284. 

effect on races, 32. 

effect on roads, 164. 

effect on Spaniards, 30. 

factors of, 133. 

land question and, 144. 

pauperism and, 392. 

population and, 74. 

relation to progress, 133. 

vigor and, 103. 

■ zones of, 133. 

Climatic efficiency, "optima" of, 

133. 
"Clothing," Part II, Chap. VIII, 

286. 
Clothing, cleanliness of, 301. 
cost of, 366. 



414 



Clubs, gambling in, 372. 

Cockroaches, 306. 

Cocoles, 265. 

Coffee, use of, 271. 

Coiffures, 299. 

Cold country, 134. 

"Colds," 138. 

Color line. See Race. 

Columbus, 152. 

Combs, Spanish, 299. 

Coinida, 259. 

Communes, Indian basis of land 

system, 157. 
Indian, number of, in 1910, 

155. 
Communal lands, Indians and, 

317, 318, 320. 
Communism, bribe to Indians, 

155. 

Indian ideal, 320. 

land and, 316, 319. 

Communications, 162-164. 
"Community and Government," 

Part II, Chap. II, 152. 
Community life, Indianism in, 

153. 
Compadre, 212. 
"Conclusion," Part II, Chap. 

XIII, 399. 
Concubinage, 351. 

See also Mistresses. 
"Conditions of Labor," Part II, 

Chap. X, 315. 
Congress, in govermnent system, 

152. 
Conquerors, 27. 

See also Spaniards. 
Conquest, objects of, 8, 320. 
Conservatives, 184, 185. 
Constitution, of 1857, ignored by 

Diaz, 160. 

peonage under, 322. 

of 1917, 26, 49, 346, 396. 



INDEX 



Constitution, of 1917, ignored by 

Carranza, 160. 

peonage under, 322. 

Cooks, 272. 

Corn, chief food, 258. 

foods from, 262-264. 

ninety-day, 148. 

prices of, 279, 364. 

production of, 145-146. 

Cornish miners, descendants of, 

42. 
Corsets, caste and, 122. 
Cortez, Hernando, 6, 22, 28, 46, 

56, 139, 236, 320. 
Cosmetics, 298. 
"Cost of Living, Income and," 

Part II, Chap. XI, 348. 
Cotton, used by Aztecs, 290. 

factories, conditions in, 335. 

factories, labor efficiency 

in, 330. 

factories, wages in, 355, 

Council of the Indies, 401. 
Courts, closing of, 387. 
Credit, hacienda system, 358. 
Creoles, caste system, 111, 112. 
— — contribution of, 38. 

definition of, 10. 

excitability of, 104, 

exiles, 16. 

expulsion of, 45, 48. 

government code of, 158, 

159. 

revolution of 1823, 46, 48. 

settlers abroad, 64. 

See also Whites. 
Crime, against persons, 385. 

against property, 383. 

deportation for, 392. 

penal system, 390. 

political, 382. 

prohibition and, 379, 389. 

statistics of, 387-389. 

27 415 



theft, 383. 

"Crime, Vices, and Pauperism,*' 

Part II, Chap. XII, 371. 
Criminals, colonists, 28. 
Crops, 146, 147. 

See also Agricvdture. 
Crowding, 253. 
Cuba, conquerors from, 27. 

slaves for, 320, 321. 

Cuetil, 290. 
Culture, Indian, 8. 
white, 37. 

Dams, 143. 

Deaf mutes, 106. 

De la Barra regime, 125. 

De las Casas, Fray Bartolome, 

322. 
Death, penalty, 391. 

■ rates, 86, 94. 

— • — rates, compared to United 

States, 94. 

rates, Mexico City, 86. 

rates, Vera Cruz, 86. 

Debt system, 323. 
Decoration, house, 247. 
Defectives, 106, 393. 
Degeneracy, 41, 118. 
Democracy, aristocracy vs., 401. 

mestizo imitations of. 158. 

no fine, 30. 

Desayuno, 258. 
Desert, cause of, 139. 

location of, 141. 

proportion, 132. 

Development, foreigners and, 

351. 
Diaz, Porfirio, 6, 9, 54, 159, 160, 

225, 318, 403, 404, 406. 

political motto of, 161. 

regime, 6, 10, 15, 38, 39, 

45, 46, 48, 70, 84, 125, 149, 

165, 201, 204, 286, 308, 314, 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



322, 333, 372, 379, 387, 401, 

407. 
Diet, intemperance in, 99. 

nutritive value, 280, 283. 

Digestion, effect of chiles on, 281. 
Dinner, 259. 

Disease, attitude toward, 101. 
- — — care of sick, 101. 

doctors and, 102. 

matlalzahuatl, 57, 101. 

pulmonary, 100. 

smallpox, 57, 102. 

typhus, 57, 101. 

venereal, 105. 

vitality and, 100. 

weather and, 102. 

Divorce, 220. 

Doheny Research Foundation, 

files, quoted, 179, 215. 
Domestic relations, law of, 213, 

220, 223. 

See also Family; Marriage; 

Divorce. 
Drainage works, 308. 
Dress. See Clothing. 
Drinking, 371. 

beer, 379. 

customs of, 374-380. 

effects of, 378. 

philosophy of, 375. 

prohibition, 378. 

regulation of, 389. 

Drunkenness, 371, 374-380. 

■ as crime, 386. 

Ducks, wild, 278. 

Durango, temperatures of, 135. 

Economics, personal, 351. 
Eden, garden of, 20. 
"Education," Part II, Chap. 

IV, 195. 
Education, budgets, 204. 
Carranza and, 205. 



416 



caste system and, 112. 

Catholic Church and, 182. 

class division on, 116. 

distribution, 203. 

growth of schools, 203. 

history of, 196-198. 

ideals of, 195. 

illiteracy, 195, 199, 200. 

Lancaster system, 196. 

mestizo, 117. 

negro in United States, 207. 

Protestant schools, 192. 

religious, 198, 205. 

"rudimentary," 197, 207. 

school statistics, 200-203. 

solution of, 206. 

teachers' strike, 205. 

Efficiency, climatic "optima," 

133. 

food and, 282. 

labor, 329. 

Egidos, 317. 
Eight-hour day, 334. 
Elections, 159. 
Emigration, 64-68. 
Enchiladas, 264. 
Encomiendas, 321, 323. 
Enganchados, 325, 327. 
England, crops in, 147. 

— death rates, 94. 
English, in American colonies, 7. 

caste of, 124. 

in colonial Mexico, 15. 

in United States, 30. 

Environment, 405. 
Epidemics, danger of, 313. 

early, 57. 

weather stops, 102. 

See also Disease. 
Espanoles, caste of. 111. 
Esquivel Obregon, T., quoted, 

7, 402. 
Eyes, blue, 42. 



INDEX 



Factories. See Industrial work- 
ers; Labor. 
Fair gods, 27. 
"Family, The," Pai't II. Chap. 

V, 210. 
Famine, 148-151. 

in 1917, 150. 

under Aztecs, 149. 

Farming, extensive, 145 

intensive, 147. 

philosophy of, 147 

Farms, yield of, 145. 
Fashions, 296. 

See also Parisian fashions. 
Father, rule of, 211. 
Fats, use of, 267, 283. 
Ferdinand VII invited to rule 

Mexico, 158. 
Feudal system, peonage and, 323 . 

transplanted, 112, 152. 

Fiat money, 348, 352. 

Fire-fighting, 167. 

Fish, use of, 277. 

Fleas, 307. 

Floors, 247. 

Florida, mjrfchical source of 

Indians, 24. 
Food, carried in hat, 291. 

distribution, 273, 279, 280. 

inspection of, 103. 

lack of, 282. 

overeating, 280. 

prices of, 364. 

speculation in, 279. 

tinned, 268. 

"Foods, Mexico's," Part II, 

Chap. VII, 257. 
Foreigners, caste of, 123-125. 

census of, 70. 

• Diaz and, 15, 406. 

excluded under Spain, 15. 

industrial development by, 

351. 



417 



in priesthood, 188. 

residents, 14. 

success, 406. 

Freedom, conception of, 10. 
Free Thinkers, 177. 
Frenchmen, caste grouping, 124. 

census of, 70. 

Fresh-air habits, 137. 
FHjoles, 257, 260. 
Frosts, 137, 151. 
Fruit, lack of, in diet, 281. 

tropical food value of, 368. 

use of, 269. 

varieties, 269. 

Fueros, 113. 
Furniture, 248-260. 

Gambling, 371-374, 

Gamio, Manuel, quoted, 178. 

Garbage, removal of, 167, 307. 

Garhanzos, 268. 

Garcia Calderon, F., quoted, 

52. 
Generals, in bourgeois class, 123. 
Generals, predatory, 54, 160. 
Germans, caste grouping, 124. 

census of, 70. 

found by Humboldt, 15. 

Germany, crops in, 147. 
Girls, position of, 229. 
God, name of, 177. 
Goiter, 106. 
Gold, coins as necklaces, 297. 

conquerors^ search for, 321. 

currency and living, 348. 

Gomez Farias, 185. 
G(yrdas (food), 266. 
"Government, Community 

and," Part II, Chap. II, 

152. 
Government, spirit of Spanish, 

153. 

state, 16X, 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Graft, government problem, 160. prevalence of, 95, 96. 

Grant, Madison, quoted, 17, See also Disease; Epidem- 

44. ics; Vitality. 

Greek Catholics, 171, 177. Henequen, 325, 326. 

Guadalajara, saved from In- Heredity, 406. 

dians, 27. mendelian laws of, 41, 43, 

Guadalupe, Virgin of, 179. 44. 

Guar aches. See Sandals. Hidalgo, Miguel, 82. 

Guatemalans, census of, 70. History, race correspondences, 
Guerrero, Julio, quoted, 117, 35. 

378, 381. pre-Spanish, 18. 

Guilds, colonial, 113. racial interpretation, 44-50. 

Hogar, 210. 

Hacendados, caste of, 126. Home, 210. 

debt system and, 329. Homogeneity of Mexico, 164. 

Haciendas, basis of land system. Horses introduced by Span- 

154. iards, 162. 
caste system and, 113. Hosj)itals, list of, 394-396. 



credit system, 358 

definition of, 154. 

food producers, 320, 328. 

housing on, 256. 

labor's background, 345. 

labor's perquisites, 357. 

land on, for peons, 316. 

nimiber of, 114. 

origin of, 319. 

peonage and, 323. 

Spanish merchants and, 

358. 

stores on, 325. 

Hair, washing of, 303. 
Hammocks, 250. 
Hampton Institute, 207, 208. 
Handkerchiefs, 122. 
Harbors, 81. 
Harvester twine, 325. 
Hasheesh, 104. 
Hats, 291, 295. 

See also Somhrero. 
Health, ill, achievement and, 

108. 
' apathy and, 97. 



Hot country, 133. 

cleanliness in, 303. 

Hotels, cheap, 255. 
Households, statistics of, 252- 

253. 
Houses, description, 238. 

rent, 365. 

"Houses, Mexican," Part II, 

Chap. VI, 235. 
Housing, modern, 255. 

statistics of, 251-256. 

Huerta, Victoriano, 49, 372, 

387. 
Huipil, 290. 
Humboldt, Alexander von, 

quoted, 15, 36, 60, 63, 87, 

88, 145, 147, 149, 353, 365, 

368. 
Humidity, 133, 138. 
Huntington, Ellsworth, quoted, 

96, 133, 138, 139. 
Husband, infidelity of, 225. 
— power of, 223, 224. 
Huts, materials for, 230. 

proportion of, 251-^53, 



418 



INDEX 



Hydro-electric developments, 

143. 
Hygiene, lack of, 100. 

Ignorance. See Education. 
Illegitimacy, 87. 
Illegitimate children, 43. 
Illiteracy, in castes, 120. 
pauperism and, 393. 

See Education. 
Immigrants, colonies, 70, 71. 
Immigration, white, 69, 71, 399, 

406. 
Improvidence, 348. 
"Income and Cost of Living," 

Part II, Chap. XI, 348. 
Income, sources of, 352, 353. 
Incompetents. See Defectives. 
Independence, wars of, 9. 
Indianism, 7, 12, 13, 14, 26, 32, 

38, 46, 48, 400, 409. 

Danger to radicals, 346. 

disintegrating government, 

170. 

in community life, 153. 

in town life, 157. 

mestizo leadership, 27. 

Indians, amalgamation with. 

See Race; Amalgamation. 

aristocracy of, 25. 

baptisms of, 57. 

bathing, 303. 

blind followers, 160. 

capture of wild ducks, 

278. 

caste system. 111. 

Catholic Church and, 25. 

contribution of, 38. 

conversion of, 29, 180. 

culture of, 8. 

debt system, 323. 

destruction after conquest, 

60. 



distributed to conqueforS, 

321. 

docility, 159. 

dress of, 289-291, 296. 

• endurance of, 95, 139. 

four strains, 19. 

higher classes of, 120. 

increase in, 39. 

intellectual traits, 30. 

land holdings, 317. . . ■ '.. > 

• language, 17. 

low caste, 118. 

mestizo leadership of, 27. 

migrations of, 18, 20. 

misfortunes of, 9. 

mythical origins, 19. 

on haciendas, 319. 

oppressors of, 25. 

philosophy of labor, 156. 

physical characteristics, 

24. 

reduced, 16. 

resurgence of, 49. 

— ■ — sanitation, 59. 

slavery under Aztecs, 25, 

321. 

social organization, 54. 

sought as slaves, 320. 

teachability of, 195. 

tribes, 17. 

truck farmers, 120. 

type unchanged, 18. 

use of land, 316. -— ^., 

wards of church, 9. 

white protection of, 401. 

workers, 39. 

working philosophy, 328. 

See also Aztecs; Chichi- 

mecs; Otomis; Toltecs; 

Yaquis; Zapotecs. 
Indies, Council of the, 401. 
Industrial workers, caste of, 120, 

121. 



419 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Industries, native labor in, 337, 

338. 

village, 155. 

Infantile mortality, 88, 89, 94, 

287. 
Insanity, 107. 
Insurance, life, 397. 
Intellectuals, caste of, 125. 

educational theories, 208. 

Intelligence, efficiency and, 331, 

332. 
Iron hand, 403. 
Irrigation, by Indians, 143. 
franchises under Diaz, 

144. 
Italians, colonies of, 70. 
Itzintzuntzan, 58. 



Jefes PoUticos, 161. 

Jenldnson, Charles, quoted, 311. 

Jewelry, 299. 

Jews, 177. 

Joseph, none in Mexico, 150. 

Journadet, quoted, 63. 

Juarez, Benito, 29, 113. 

land laws of, 317. 

Juarez, Ciudad, gambling at, 
373. 

Kansas, corn crop of, 146. 
KeUey, Mons. Francis J., quoted, 

172, 173, 175, 177. 
ICitchen, 247, 307. 

Labor, advances to, 324, 326. 

carelessness of, 331. 

castes of, 119. 

contract, 325, 327. 

department of, 341. 

■ efficiency of, 329. 

enganchados, 325, 327. 

haciendas, 320. 

hours of, 333. 



■ improves in United States, 

69. 

industrial, 337, 338. 

money advances to, 324. 

— — organizations of, 345. 

perquisites, 357. 

prison, 391. 

salaries. See Wages. 

scarcity in 1890-1900, 325. 

social classifications, 336. 

statistics of, 338. 

study of, 341. 

task system, 334. 

unions, 346. 

unrehability of, 349. 

unskilled, 336, 338. 

wages of, 326. 

workingmen's compensa- 
tion, 397. 
See also Peonage. 

"Labor, Conditions of," Part 
II, Chap. X, 315. 

Land, arable, 132, 145. 

arid, 145. 

castes and, 113. 

Indian holdings, 317. 

irrigated, 144. 

"Law of Survey," 318. 

population and, 74. 

problem, 315. 

redistribution of, 144. 

use of, 316. 

water rights, 143. 

Land laws, rancher os and, 319. 

under Diaz, 318. 

under Juarez, 317. 

under Spaniards, 317, 319. 

Latin-American race, 48. 
See also Mestizos. 

Latitude, importance of, 134. 

Laundry customs, 301, 302, 366. 

Lawyers, caste of, 125. 

Leather, clothing of, 290. 
420 



INDEX 



Legal procedure in criminal 

cases, 389. 
Leperos, 116, 117, 301. 
Liberals, 184, 185. 
Life insurance, 381, 397. 
Lighting, caste and, 120. 

street, 166. 

Liquor, prohibition, 378. 

use of, 270, 371, 374-380. 

Liquors, native, 376. 
Living, cost of, 360, 



divorce laws, 220. 

festivals, 215. 

in lower castes, 119, 121. 

legal, 216, 218. 

Mexican idea of, 212, 221, 

224, 225. 

number of, 216, 217, 218. 

objects of, 225. 

rates, 88. 

Matamoras, temperatures, 135. 
Matriarchy, 231. 



"Living, Income and Cost of," Maximilian, 158, 186. 



Part II, Chap. IX, 348. 
Longevity, average, 90. 
Lotteries, 373. 
Louisiana, settlers from Mexico, 

64. 
Lozada, 27. 
Luncheon, 259. 



Maxtli, 290. 

Maya Indians, 19, 81. 

Mayo-Smith, Richmond, quoted, 

218. 
Meals, typical, 258. 
Meat, distribution of, 275-277. 

use of, 258, 275. 

"Melting Pot," Part I, Chap. 

Ill, 35. 



MacGregor family, 42. 

Machinery, Mexican labor and. Melting pot, 31, 51. 

329. MendeUan law, 41, 43, 44. 

labor-saving, 332. Merida, temperatures at, 135. 

Madero, Francisco I, 45, 50, Mesones, 254. 

64, 68, 125, 160, 165, 199, Mestizos, agitators, 402. 



208. 

quoted, 64, 208. 

Maguey. See Pulque. — 

Maize. See Corn. — 

Manila, galleons from, 64. — 

Manta (muslin), clothes of, 289. — 
Mantilla, 295. - 

Marihuana, 105. — 

Market, Viga, 274. 
Marketing, 272. 
Marriage, age of, 99, 214, 218. 

Church control of, 213. — 

Church quarrel over, 188. 

cost of, 215. — 

demanded by Protestants, — 

192. 

disrepute of, 188, 216. 

421 



- caste system, 111. 

- contribution of, 38, 51. 

- definition, 4. 

- domination of, 45, 48. 

- first crossings, 40. 

- government, 11, 12, 158. 

- increase, 98. 

- intellectual traits, 5, 31. 

- leadership, 27, 53. 

- middle class, 116. 

- "new race," 8, 40. 

- physical characteristics, 4, 
31. 

- political activity, 404. 

- preponderance of, 37. 

- problem of government, 
159. 



THE PEOPLE or MEXICO 



Mestizos, racial instability, 41. 

racial place, 40. 

revolutionaries, 11. 

white culture, 37. 

See also Indianism; Middle 

class. 
"Mexican Type, The," Part I, 

Chap. I, 1. 
Mexico City, crowding in, 253. 

temperatures of, 135. 

Mezcal, 376. 

Michoacan, 57. 

Middle class, budgets, 362. 

cleanliness, 304. 

economic condition, 352. 

origin of, 114, 115. 

stability of, 128. 

upper, 123. 

Migrations of Indians, 18, 20. 
Military search, 384. 
Milk, handling of, 275. 

trains, 377. 

Milpa, 156. 

Mineral water, 272. 

Mining, Indian slaves in, 322. 

methods of, 335. 

Mistresses, 227. 
Mohammedans, 171, 602. 
Mohler, J. C, quoted, 146. 
Molina Enriquez, Andres, 

quoted, 117. 
Money, paper, 348, 352. 
Monkeys as food, 284. 
Montando, Captain, 57. 
Monte de Piedad, 368. 
Monterrey, corn crop about, 145. 

famine in 1917, 150. 

temperatures of, 135. 

Montezuma, 29, 95. 
Mormons, 71, 406. 
Mortality. See Death rates. 
■ Infantile. See Infantile 

flsortality. 



432 



Mosquito bars, 250, 
Mountains, distribution of, 141. 

rainfall and, 142. 

Mulattos, 111. 

Municipalities, government of, 
161. 

Nahua Indians, 19, 21, 23. 
Nationality, idea of, 51. 
Natiu-alized citizens, 70. 
Necaxa, 143. 

Necklaces of Tehuanas, 297. 
Negroes, 41, 111. 
Nervous types suffer from alti- 
tude, 139. 
Night air, 100, 137. 
Nonsocial elements, 402. 
"Northers," 136, 137. 

effect on climate, 140. 

Nuns, 172, 174. 

Oaxaca, temperatures at, 135. 
Obregon, Alvaro, 165. 
Order, public, 159. 
Orphan asylums, 394. 
O'Shaughnessy, Nelson, quoted, 

49. 
Otomi Indians, 19, 24. 
dress of, 290. 

"P," signifying peso, 184. 
Pacheco, Gen. Carlos, quoted, 

58. 
Pacification, transportation and, 

165. 
Paganism, 178-179. 

See also Religion. 
Palenque, 21, 59. 
Palm, as building material, 240. 
Panuco, landing of Nahuas, 21, 

22. 
Paris fashions, 123, 296. 
Patios, 236, 238, 245. 



INDEX 



Pairia, 165. 
Patriarchy, 211, 224, 
Patriotism, 165, 407. 
Pauperism, 392-397. 

asylimas, 393-396. 

• defectives, 106, 393, 

pensions, 396. 

See also Poverty. 
"Pauperism, Vices, Crime, and," 

Part II, Chap. XII, 371. 
Pawnshops, 368. 
Pe7nol, 265. 
Penal system, 390. 
Peninsulares, 110. 
Pennsylvania, death rates, 94. 
Pensions, 396. 
Peonage, 320-328. 

constitution and, 322. 

foundations of, 357. 

— — hacienda store system, 325. 
Peons, bathing, 303. 

— budget of, 362. 
debt system, 324. 

— — ■ destructiveness of, 385. 

— dress of, 289, 291. 
food of, 260. 

in revolutions, 404. 

— land, use of, 316. 

population of, 336, 338. 

system of work, 349. 

Peppers. See Chiles. 
"Personalism," 6. 

Peso, 184. 

Petates, 250. 

Philippines, settled from Mexico, 

64. 
Physicians, sanitary activities, 

310. 
Pigs, as scavengers, 309. 

sleeping with, 251. 

Plantations, v^jnerican labor on, 

325, 326. 
Plateaus, population and, 77 



423 



Plazas, 236, 237. 

Plumbing, 307. 

PoUce, 165. 

• crimes against, 387-388. 

Policemen, caste of, 121. 

Politics, conservatives and liber- 
als, 184-185. 

in revolution, 159. 

nature of, 401. 

"Personalism" in, 6, 

race correspondences, 35. 

rifle and machete, 401. 

"Population," Part I, Chap. 
IV, 56. 

Population, 56-61, 

age groups, 91. 

— autocolonization, 83. 

Aztec, 58. 

changes in, 73. 

density of, 71-73. 

distribution of, 72-73. 

in 1920, 62. 

rate of growth, 62, 63. 

rural, 74. 

rural, by states, 78. 

town dwellers, 74. 

urban, by states, 78, 

Pork, trichina in, 103. 

Posole, 265. 

Potatoes, use of, 268. 

Poultry, use of, 277. 

Poverty, food and, 365. 

of peons, 349. 

uncleanliness and, 301. 

See also Pauperism. 

Priests. See Catholic Church. 

Prison reform, 391. 

Prisons, 390, 

Production, low standards of, 
333. 

Productivity of labor, 329. 

Professional men, caste of, 125. 

Prohibition, 378. 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Prohibition and crime, 379, 389. 
See also Drinking. 

Property, crimes against, 382, 
387, 389. 

increase in rural, 154. 

of Indians, 317. 

of married persons, 222. 

Spanish conception of, 153. 

Prostitution, 381. 

Protestants, comment on pagan- 
ism, 178. 

difficulties of, 190, 193. 

■ first missionaries, 191. 

in United States, 175. 

lack of funds, 193. 

objects of work, 189, 190. 

political activities, 189. 

— — - schools, 192. 

statistics, 175-176. 

untouched by revolution, 

177. 

See also Religion. 

Provincialism, poor roads and, 
163. 

Pseudosocial class, 404. 

Pulque, 376-377. 

an autointoxicant, 105. 

— labor and, 327. 

Punishment, capital, 391. 

for crime, 390. 

Race amalgamation, 8, 29, 34, 
42. 

blonds in crossings, 42. 

caste parallels, 127. 

class and, 110. 

color line, 54, 111, 116. 

correspondences, 35. 

elements, 15. 

history and, 44-50. 

importance of, 405, 406. 

inheritances, 41, 43. 

instability of mixtures, 41. 



424 



isolation, 14. 

" Latin- American," 48. 

mestizo, 8. 

mixtures, 42. 

purity of, 24. 

social values of, 38. 

struggle, 7, 8, 26, 47. 

See also Castes; Indians; 
Mestizos; Whites. 

"Race Origins," Part I, Chap. 
II, 14. 

Radicalism, 346. 

Railway men, caste of, 122. 

Railways, autocolonization and, 
84. 

built by Americans, 84. 

cities and, 81. 

merger of, 122. 

Mexicanization of, 115. 

national of Mexico, Ameri- 
cans in, 122. 

training schools, 115, 330, 

331. 

Rainfall, amount of, 141. 

causes of, 139. 

Hmnboldt's statistics, 147. 

mountains and, 142. 

population and, 75-77. 

roads and, 164. 

Rainstorms, from Gulf of Mex- 
ico, 141. 

Rainy season, 137, 140. 

length of, 139. 

Ranches, number of, 114. 

Rancheros, 115, 154. 

Rankin, Miss Matilda, 191. 

Ratzel, quoted, 28. 

Reboso, 119, 288, 295. 

as sign of caste, 122. 

Red Cross, American, sanitation 
of Vera Cruz, 311. 

sends corn, 150. 

Reform, laws of. See Religion, 



INDEX 



lleform schools, 391. 
Regla, Conde de, 368. 
"Religion," Part II, Chap. Ill, 

170. 
ReHgion, American Bible Soci- 
ety, 191. 

Aztec, 180. 

• Catholic missions, 181. 

cemetery services, 187. 

church buildings, 173, 174, 

175. 

conversion of Indians, 180. 

Jesuits, 180. 

marriage. See Marriage. 

■ nature of, 178. 

outrages, 177. 

Pious fund, 184, 185. 

population, 171, 174-177. 

Protestants, 171, 175, 176. 

reform laws, 113, 186, 187, 

188, 191, 213, 214. 

reform, wars of, 35. 

Spanish fanaticism, 180. 

zeal of Spaniards, 7. 

See also Catholic Church; 

Protestants. 
Rents, 365. 
Repartimientos, 321. 
Republic, federalized, 152. 
RevUlagigedo, Conde de, census 

of, 60. 
Revolution, of 1810, 46, 50. 

of 1823, 46, 48. 

of 1910-20, 48, 70, 177, 

346. 
Revolutions, number of, 159. 

start of, 165. 

Rice, preparation of, 268. 
Rivas Palacio, Vicente, quoted, 

51. 
Rivers, 81. 

absence of, 142. 

"Hidden," 142. 



425 



Roads, 162-164. 

Rockefeller Institute, 109. 

Roman Catholic Church. I^eie 
Catholic Church. 

Romero, Matias, quoted, 329,- 
364. 

Roofs, 242. 

Rooms of Mexican houses, 246. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted, 
177. 

Root, EHhu, 177. 

Rubber, American plantations, 
325. 

Ruins, population indicated by, 
59. 

— — rivers and, 81. 

Rural, property, increase in, 154. 

population. See Popula- 
tion. 

Rurales, 166. 

Sahara desert, causes of, 140. 

Salaries. See Wages. 

Salina Cruz, temperatures, of, 

135. 
Saltillo, temperatures of, 135. 
Salto Atras, 41. 
Sandals, 294, 298. 
"Sanitation," Part II, Chap. 

IX, 301. 
Sanitation, difficulties of, 309. 

Indian lack of, 59. 

police and, 166. 

under Diaz, 308. 

Vera Cruz, 311. 

San Luis Potosi, temperatures 

of, 135. 
San Lunes, 375. 
Scavengers, 309. 
Schools. See Education. 
Self-made men, caste of, 125. 
Senoritas, place of, 232. 
Servants, caste of, 120. 



I THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



Servants, food of, 273. 

position in home, 212. 

Sesto, Julio, quoted, 225. 

Sevillana, 295. 

Sewage disposal, 309. 

Sexual overindulgence, 99, 380. 

Shawls. See Reboso; Zerape. 

Shelter, cost of, 365. 

Shoes, 294. 

as class distinction, 298. 

cost of, 367. 

Shopkeepers, caste of, 122. 

Sick, care of, 101. 

Sickness. See also Disease; 

Health, ill. 
Sillar, 241. 

Slave labor, caste of, 119. 
Slavery, hacienda store system, 

325. 

Indians sought for, 320. 

of Indians, 321. 

under Aztecs, 25. 

See also Peonage. 
Sleeping habits, 250. 
Slums, 253. 
Soap, cost of, 366. 

scarcity of, 301. 

Social question, untouched by 

Diaz, 10. 
Social values of races, 38. 
Sociahsm, 11, 49, 121, 346. 
Soil contamination, 310. 
Soldadera, 96, 233. 
Soldiers, average march of, 96. 

caste of, 118. 

Sombrero, 287, 288, 291. 

as mark of caste, 119. 

Spain, death rates, 94. 

king of Church and, 183. 

See also Charles IV; Charles 

V; Ferdinand VII. 
Spaniards, census of, 70. 
climate and, 30. 



426 



colonists, 28. 

crossings with negroes, 41. 

expulsion of, 9, 45. 

grocery clerks, 123. 

land laws of, 317, 319. 

■ numbers, 15. 

religious zeal, 7. 

social structiu-e, 110. 

See also Asturians; Basques. 
Spanish language, 15, 17, 18. 
Starr, Frederick, quoted, 98, 107. 
Starvation, 392. 
Statistics, Mexican, unreliability 

of, 36, 37, 67, 92, 107, 199. 
St. John's Day, baths on, 118, 

301, 303. 
Streets, care of, 167, 
— description of, 237-239. 
Styles. See Clothing. 
Survey, laws of, 318. 
Sweat-shops, 335. 
Syphilis, 105. 

Tacubaya, casino of, 372. 

TaUors, 293. 

Tamales, 264. 

Tampico, American colonies at, 
71. 

Tareas, 334. 

Task system, 334. 

Taxes, collection of, 161. 

Tea, use of, 272. 

Tehuanas, dress of, 297. 

Tehuantepec, Isthmus of, Amer- 
ican colonies on, 71. 

American plantations, 325. 

crossed by Nahuas, 22. 

dress of women of, 297. 

Temperate country, 134. 

Temperature, monotony of, 136. 

seasonal range of, 135. 

Temperatures, ideal, 133. 
night, 137. 



INDEX 



Tenements, 253. 
Teotihuacan, 23, 32, 59. 
Tepetate, 241. 
Tequila, 376. 
Texontle, 241. 

Theaters, town control of, 162. 
Tienda de raya, 325. 
Tierra, love of, 162, 164. 

Caliente, 133. 

Fria, 134. 

Templada, 134. 

Tijuana, gambling at, 373. 
Tile, floors, 247. 

roofs, 243. 

Timatli, 290. 
Tinsel on clothes, 287. 
Toltec Indians, 19, 21, 23, 24. 
Tools, use of, 332. 
Tortillas, 257, 260, 262, 263. 
Town dwellers, 74. 

plan, 237. 

spirit, 162. 

Traditions, sanitation and, 313. 
Tramways, lottery scheme of, 

374. 
Trousers, 293. 
True elite, 400, 402. 
Tuskeegee Institute, 207. 
"Type, the Mexican," Part I, 

Chap. I, 1. 

Underclothing, 298. 
Undernourishment, 104, 282, 

285. 
Unions, labor. See Labor. 



Vagrancy laws, 390. 

Valle Nacional, 327. 

Valley of Mexico, 19. 

Indian population of, 57, 

58. 

Indians in, 19, 20, 22, 23. 

population's cradle, 82. 

Vegetables, use of, 267-268. 

Venereal diseases, 105. 

Vera Cruz, sanitation of, 311. 

temperatures at, 135. 

United States army doctors 

in, 109. 
Vermin, 100, 306. 
"Vices, Crime, and Pauperism," 

Part II, Chap. XII, 371. 
Viga Canal, 274. 
Villages preferred by Indians, 

156. 
"Vitality," Part I, Chap. V, 86. 

Wages, agricultural, 354, 356. 

Americans, 356. 

Aztecs, 353. 

clerk class, 357. 

comparative, 356. 

general, 326, 331. 

history of, 353. 

living habits and, 350. 

peon, 360. 

perquisites, 357. 

railway, 355. 

school-teachers, 357. 

women, 342-345. 

War, population and, 59, 100. 



United States, army, sanitation Water power, 143. 



of Vera Cruz, 109, 311. 

death rates, 94. 

emigration to, 65-68. 

Mexicans in, 65-68. 

population, growth, 62. 

Usumacinta River, 82. 
Usury, 351, 352, 369. 



supply, 308. 

uses of streams, 310. 

Waterclosets, 307. 
Weather epidemics stopped by, 
102. 

See also Climate. 
Wells, David A., quoted, 330. 
427 



c-^-^ 



THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO 



White man's burden, 406. 
Whites, civilization of, 34. 

control by, 49. 

domination of, 45. 

education, 200. 

expulsion of, 48. 

government, 159. 

immigration of, 399, 406. 

labor of, 39. 

reduction in numbers, 47. 

sanitary measm-es of, 314. 

■ savior of lower races, 25. 

See also Aristocracy; Race. 
White world, 12, 407. 
Wine, use of, 270, 370. 

See also Drinking. 
Wives, influence of, 226. 

position of, 222, 224, 228. 

Women, attitude toward, 380. 

child-bearing, 219. 

education of, 232. 

fecundity of, 97, 98. 

home work, 233. 

in army, 233. 

labor of, 225, 232, 234, 341- 

345. 



sex, 380. 

social life, 231. 

virtues of, 225, 226, 227. 

Workingmen's compensation, 

396. 
World atlas of foreign missions, 

quoted, 175. 
Worms as food, 284. 

Yaqui Indians, 19, 392. 
Yellow world, 407. 
Yucatan, colonial slave trade, 
64. 

criminal labor in, 392. 

invaded by Nahuas, 21. 

labor question, 329. 

Maya Indians, 19. 

peonage in, 325, 326. 

prohibition in, 379. 

Zacatecas, Nahuas in, 21, 23. 

temperatures of, 135. 

Zambos, 111. 

Zapata, Emiliano, 26. 

Zempoala, 59. 

Zerape, 286, 289, 290, 292, 368. 



THE END 



<^(. 



